Intelligence vs. Wisdom

A human mind is a complicated place, there is so much going on all the time. It has to come up with thoughts, help people in making decisions and even move or perform a function to keep the human body moving. Thoughts that enter a human mind is based on how they go about their lives and conduct themselves. Many people do not bother knowing that they are saying while other people evaluate what they say and keep in mind the consequences which can arise. People who actually have the ability to differentiate between right and wrong can be divided into two different terms which are wisdom and intelligence. Both of them are qualities of human being and usually confused with each other since they are considered similar. But there are many differences between them, although they do relate in some ways. Moving on to their definition, intelligence is the ability of human being to gain information and then apply that into daily lives and become skilled. Any person with these skills is known as intelligent. On the other hand, wisdom is a more complicated phenomenon. It is the quality of gaining valuable experiences, from which knowledge is acquired, which helps in making sound judgments. A person who has these traits is known as a wise person. Another way of differentiating them would be their derivation. Intelligence was derived from a Latin word Intus, which means, to read. It is the interest of people of what they want to know about. Wisdom, on the flipside, is derived from the Latin word Sapientia, which means taste. It is the unique features of a person which make him different from others. Anyone can be born intelligent; it cannot be gained after experiencing something or improved by working. Wisdom can be gained since it is based on experiences, history and learning from the events which can change a person. Another way of showing the variations between them is that intelligence can be termed as a technical ability which can be applied to solving a problem. Wisdom is the ability to the information which is already given and implement it in such a way that good actions are taken. This can be termed as a practical thing. A wise person has to be intelligent, but an intelligent person isn’t always wise. There are some other differences too, which are mentioned at the end of the topic. For now, a brief explanation of these two types is given in the next paragraphs.