Quotes & Sayings About Being Smarter Than Others Think

In other news, Aang dominates on "Are You Smarter Than the Fire Nation". Bella Swan becomes engaged to her boyfriend of one year, Edward Cullen, and unceremoniously sends Jacob Black to the "friend zone". Pop star Candy Cane trades her controversial career for being a housewife (which was a move that is very unpopular with many of her young fans), and Jacquel Rassenworth is still the Internet's biggest fame-nut (cue APPLAUSE). — Jacquel Chrissy May

At her easiest, she was hard, because her brain was always working, working, working - I had to exert myself just to keep pace with her. I'd spend an hour crafting a casual e-mail to her, I became a student of arcana so I could keep her interested: the Lake poets, the code duello, the French Revolution. Her mind was both wide and deep, and I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive, and almost electric, because for Amy, love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result.
Amy made me believe I was exceptional, that I was up to her level of play. That was both our making and undoing. Because I couldn't handle the demands of greatness. I began craving ease and averageness, and I hated myself for it, and ultimately, I realized, I punished her for it. I turned her into the brittle, prickly thing she became. — Gillian Flynn

Another case for the dumbness of reading, however, is that books do not contain answers, but rather pose more questions. And asking questions makes you look dumber, not smarter.
I thought Alice's Adventures in Wonderland would be a delightful romp through a child's subconscious, but while reading it I started to ask questions like "How do you really speak to other humans when our language often means the opposite of what is intended?" and "How do I really know anyone?" And so on, until I was asking the question "Why even exist at all?"
That didn't make me smarter! That made me wish for death, and being dead looks way dumber than being alive. — Dan Wilbur

I'm busy doing my job, and being a loudmouth doesn't appeal to me as much as when I was younger and had the youthful delusion that I was smarter than everybody else. — Steve Albini

They were now their own unavoidable experiment, and were making themselves into many things they had never been before: augmented, multi-sexed, and most importantly, very long-lived, the oldest at that point being around two hundred years old. But not one whit wiser, or even more intelligent. Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since, dogs when we had been wolves. But also, despite that individual diminuation, finding ways to accumulate knowledge and power, compiling records, also techniques, practices, sciences
possibly smarter therefore as a species than as individuals, but prone to insanity either way ... — Kim Stanley Robinson

All through their relationship, Harry was the one in charge, Harry was the one who gave them direction. This wasn't because Harry was smarter or even better at it than Craig was; it just meant more to him, to be in control. And Craig didn't really care, so he ceded it away. He liked not being responsible all the time.
Complacency. Craig realizes now that this was complacency. One of the reasons he liked the sound of Harry's voice was because it meant he didn't have to use his own. But eventually this strategy backfired. Eventually Harry realized what was happening, and didn't feel right about it. He wanted Craig to fight a little more, but by the time Craig started fighting for them to stay together, he had already lost. — David Levithan

Deep Blue didn't win by being smarter than a human; it won by being millions of times faster than a human. Deep Blue had no intuition. An expert human player looks at a board position and immediately sees what areas of play are most likely to be fruitful or dangerous, whereas a computer has no innate sense of what is important and must explore many more options. Deep Blue also had no sense of the history of the game, and didn't know anything about its opponent. It played chess yet didn't understand chess, in the same way a calculator performs arithmetic bud doesn't understand mathematics. — Jeff Hawkins

What about you?" Scarlet asked. "You have to enjoy the fear, too. Just a little?"
"Not the fear," Han said. "I just like being a little smarter than the next guy."
"That's all it is?"
"That, and I really hate paying taxes. — James S.A. Corey

Being an investment banker is pretty much the perfect job for an all around triple-threat genius, and because I'm doing so well with it, I know I'm actually smarter than certifiable geniuses like Stephen Hawking and Einstein. — A.D. Aliwat

Shut up about Leibniz for a moment, Rudy, because look here: You - Rudy - and I are on a train, as it were, sitting in the dining car, having a nice conversation, and that train is being pulled along at a terrific clip by certain locomotives named The Bertrand Russell and Riemann and Euler and others. And our friend Lawrence is running alongside the train, trying to keep up with us - it's not that we're smarter than he is, necessarily, but that he's a farmer who didn't get a ticket. And I, Rudy, am simply reaching out through the open window here, trying to pull him onto the fucking train with us so that the three of us can have a nice little chat about mathematics without having to listen to him panting and gasping for breath the whole way. — Neal Stephenson

You seemed to be listening to me, not to find out useful information, but to try to catch me in a logical fallacy. This tells us all that you are used to being smarter than your teachers, and that you listen to them in order to catch them making mistakes and prove how smart you are to the other students. This is such a pointless, stupid way of listening to teachers that it is clear you are going to waste months of our time before you finally catch on that the only transaction that matters is a transfer of useful information from adults who possess it to children who do not, and that catching mistakes is a criminal misuse of time. — Orson Scott Card

Women's tennis is getting faster and the girls are getting more athletic, so I need to push myself to become a better athlete. I think 2013 showed me, like a few other years how important being healthy is and how I must listen to my body. During this off season I have been a little smarter on how I train and how I treat my body. — Maria Sharapova

Thomas grunted. "Might have been smarter for them to have left you alone. Now you know something."
I made an exasperated sound. "Yes. Those fools. By trying to kill me, they've revealed their very souls. I have them now."
Thomas gave me a steady look. "Being Mab's bitch has made you a pessimist."
"I am not a pessimist," I said loftily. "Though that can't last."
That made Thomas grin. "Nice."
"Thank you. — Jim Butcher

What else? She is so beautiful. You don't get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers. — John Green

Girls think that being glamorous means making mistakes and being irresponsible. And that's just not true. The smarter you are, the better prepared you are to make decisions in your life, the more likely you are to lead a satisfying life and be glamorous and fun and anything you want to be. — Danica McKellar

He liked to start sentences with okay, so. It was a habit he had picked up from the engineers. He thought it made him sound smarter, thought it made him sound like them, those code jockeys, standing by the coffee machine, talking faster than he could think, talking not so much in sentences as in data structures, dense clumps of logic with the occasional inside joke. He liked to stand near them, pretending to stir sugar into his coffee, listening in on them as if they were speaking a different language. A language of knowing something, a language of being an expert at something. A language of being something more than an hourly unit. — Charles Yu

Do you have difficulty sleeping?"
"Sometimes not. When I do it's bad, though. I lie there thinking about how everything I've done is a failure, death and failure, and there's no hope for me except being homeless, because I'm never going to be able to hold a job because everyone else is so much smarter. — Ned Vizzini

Because of their sublime genes, the orphans were all incredible specimens and often referred to by their creator, Doctor Pedemont, and by Naylor, Kentbridge and the rest of their Omega masters, as post-humans. Their DNA was different to anyone else's and by their teens they were superior in many ways to the rest of the population, being smarter, faster, stronger and more adaptable. — James Morcan

Microsoft is ten times smarter, a hundred times more aggressive, and bound by no particular rules. It gives Randy a little frisson just to imagine Harvard Li's situation: being chased across the planet by Microsoft's state-of-the-art hellhounds. — Neal Stephenson

In the meantime: (1) be direct; (2) remember that, being smarter than men, women respond to courtesy and kindness; (3) if you want to know what kind of a wife someone will make, observe her around her father and mother; (4) as to who gets out of the elevator first, I just can't help you. — David Mamet

My mind is just a product of 50 years of being taught. I'm no smarter than anyone else, but I've been taught by some wonderful people. — Tony La Russa

She is so beautiful. You don't get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her. — John Green

I think Willim Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank though, that's not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don't even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are. — Kurt Vonnegut

Instead of ignoring me, Frankie was suddenly noticing every little thing I did, wondering why I did it. Christina started asking me questions about things, like I was the smarter brother. Dad was now confiding in me about things that were really none of my business, and Mom started treating me like I was actually a responsible human being. It was all very disturbing. — Neal Shusterman

Being smarter gives you a tailwind throughout life. People who are more intelligent earn more, live longer, get divorced less, are less likely to get addicted to alcohol and tobacco, and their children live longer. — Steven Pinker

I don't know what's going on ... and I'm probably not smart enough to understand if somebody was to explain it to me. All I know is we're being tested somehow, by somebody or some thing a whole lot smarter than us, and all I can do is be friendly and keep calm and try and have a nice time till it's over. — Kurt Vonnegut

I know everything's alright but I want proof and the Buddhas and the Virgin Marys are there reminding me of the solemn pledge of faith in this harsh and stupid earth where we rage our so-called lives in a sea of worry, meat for Chicagos of Graves - right this minute my very father and my very brother lie side by side in mud in the North and I'm supposed to be smarter than they are - being quick I am dead. — Jack Kerouac

The real problem with us Africans is our inability to recognize the saviors among us
Being confident is often confused with proudness
The West may look smarter collectively, but in actual fact the greatness can be traced back to a handful of people who had the brain waves and courage to invent great things of value.
It's never too late. — Peter Ojo

All things considered, I've learned more from talking to painters than talking to writers. Not that painters are smarter than writers, such is seldom the case, but in conversation writers are inclined to waste an inordinate amount of time either bragging or bellyaching about reviews and royalties, complaining about their publishers, or dissing other authors. Painters, being equally insecure, can likewise come across as boring and bitchy
it's tough being creative in a materialistic society
but since they labor not in vineyards of verbiage but upon ice floes of visual images, they tend to function with fewer inhibitions than the wordsmiths when it comes to vocally exploring and expressing ideas. Since no one judges their speech, comparing it to their written work, they don't feel so acutely the weight of language. — Tom Robbins

At first sight, joy seems to be connected with being different. When you receive a compliment or win an award, you experience the joy of not being the same as others. You are faster, smarter, more beautiful, and it is that difference that brings you joy. But such joy is very temporary. True joy is hidden where we are the same as other people: fragile and mortal. It is the joy of belonging to the human race. It is the joy of being with others as a friend, a companion, a fellow traveler. This is the joy of Jesus, who is Emmanuel: God-with-us. — Henri J.M. Nouwen