Norman Schwarzkopf Quotes

It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.

I was smart, to tell you the truth. I'm not really bright, but I'm not stupid.

Knowledge fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one.

The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed.

Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.

I love any discourse of rivers, and fish and fishing.

Try to catch a trout and experience the glorious feeling of letting it go and seeing it swimming away.

Fishing, Danny boy, is purely a state of mind. Some men, when they are fishing, are after fish. Me, I'm after things you could never set a barbed hook in.

I love the human mind.

The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process.

We avenge intelligence when we deceive a fool, and the victory is worth the trouble

I go fishing not to find myself but to lose myself.

Absolute brain size does not tell you everything or possibly sometimes even much. Elephants and whales both have brains larger than ours, but you wouldn't have much trouble outwitting them in contract negotiations.

If being smart is what you say it is, I will remain a fool my entire life.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

When you drop the ego, you drop a whole world that you have created around it. For the first time you are able to see things as they are - not as you would like them to be. And when you are capable of knowing the facts of life, you become capable of knowing the truth. The facility of life is the first step towards truth. And ego is the most falsifying agent.

Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance beween spirit and humility.

Be confident. Be compassionate. Be intelligent. Be humble. Be generous. The universe returns to you what you put out.

You know, ogres only sound stupid. Most are pretty smart." "And it's a shallow person who judges anyone by the way they sound. I'm so shallow I'm surprised I don't reflect myself.

Nature is inexorable. If men do not follow the truth they cannot live.

Brain against brute force - and brain came out on the top - as its bound to do.

It is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

When you give success to stupid people, it makes them more stupid sometimes and not more intelligent.

Some [people] are really smart. You know who you are. Some [people] are really thick. Unfortunately, you don't know who you are.

Life, in a sense, is living and surviving. And all that makes for living and surviving is good. He who follows the fact cannot go astray, while he who has no reverence for the fact wanders afar.