My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
Interpretation
The quote humorously suggests that being highly educated doesn't necessarily equate to being wise or intelligent.
Arthur C. Clarke's quote plays on the idea that formal education and intelligence are not always aligned. It implies that one can acquire a lot of knowledge through education but may still lack the common sense or insight that represents true intelligence. This points to the potential absurdity of valuing academic qualifications over practical wisdom.
In practice
In a discussion about the value of formal education vs. practical experience.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence
While we are making up our minds as to when we shall begin, the opportunity is lost.
When you sing that this country was founded on freedom, don't forget the duet of shackles dragging against the ground my entire life.
Things take the time they take. Don't worry.
The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross. The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best. They might direct you through a busy intersection, but they wouldn't follow you home and park your car.
Awareness, not deprivation, informs what you eat. Presence, not shame, changes how you see yourself and what you rely on.
. . from this moment The very firstlings of my heart shall be The firstlings of my hand. And even now, To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done.
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