An intelligent woman is a woman with whom one can be as stupid as one wants.

The line defines “intelligence” in a relational, even paradoxical way: the truly intelligent person is not the one who constantly displays intellect, but the one who creates a space where another can drop performance and pretense. Read this way, the remark praises emotional security and tact—an intelligent woman is someone whose understanding is broad enough to accommodate another’s silliness, fatigue, or unguarded self without contempt. At the same time, the aphorism carries a gendered, salon-wit edge typical of epigrammatic social observation: it can be taken as a compliment to women’s perceptiveness, but also as a male-centered definition that measures her “intelligence” by the comfort she provides him.