“If by intellectual you mean somebody who works only with his head and not with his hands,

“If by intellectual you mean somebody who works only with his head and not with his hands, then the bank clerk is an intellectual and Michelangelo is not. And today, with a computer, everybody is an intellectual. So I don’t think it has anything to do with someone’s profession or with someone’s social class. According to me, an intellectual is anyone who is creatively producing new knowledge. A peasant who understands that a new kind of graft can produce a new species of apples has at that moment produced an intellectual activity. Whereas the professor of philosophy who all his life repeats the same lecture on Heidegger doesn’t amount to an intellectual. Critical creativity — criticizing what we are doing or inventing better ways of doing it — is the only mark of the intellectual function.”

~ Umberto Eco (“The Art of Fiction, No. 197”, The Paris Review/Summer 2008, No. 185, Art by Michael Taylor)

~ Ps. My dad always said:“You cannot learn to be ,intelligent’, no school or academic title give you that… With ,intelligence’ you can only born. That’s why we have many educated people, so many times more stupid than these without education, and only few, over the centuries, so-called: geniuses.” I agree with that… I think Eco was one of the few geniuses in our century we had honor to know up close.