Differences between an Intelligent Person and a Wise Person
1. Intelligent person learns from other people’s life experiences while wise person learns from going through those life experiences by themselves.
2. Intelligent person is equipped with knowledge while wise person guides his life based on his judgements.
3. Intelligent person usually employs logic to make decisions while wise person typically trusts their spirituality and emotionality with this task.
4. Intelligent person relies on his rationale more often than on his intuition while wise person usually trusts his gut feeling as it is rarely wrong.
5. Knowledge can be shared but wisdom not always. In other words, it is far easier for intelligent people to share what they have gathered while for wise people, it requires extra effort and even then, what they want to say can be wrongly construed or misunderstood, so their imparted wisdom cannot always reach its listeners.
Hermann Hesse’s quote from Siddhartha sums it up the best: “Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else … Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom.”
One important caveat: Some people can be both intelligent, as well as wise, and in that case, it is just a matter of preference which side of you (intelligent vs. wise) outweighs the other, making the decisions based on it.
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