Quotes
Quotes about Intellect
Nature has color-coded groups of individuals so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectually rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and profitably be used by the pragmatic man in the street.
If we encountered a man or rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read. - Ralph Waldo Emerson,
The solitary side of our nature demands leisure for reflection upon subjects on which the dash and whirl of daily business, so long as its clouds rise thick about us, forbid the intellect to fasten itself.
The discussions of every age are filled with the issues on which its leading schools of thought differ. But the general intellectual atmosphere of the time is always determined by the views on which the opposing schools agree. They become the unspoken presuppositions of all thought, and common and unquestioningly accepted foundations on which all discussion proceeds.
The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. Godlike he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis completely expressible in words.
We may seek God by our intellect, but we only can find him with our heart.
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. â¢John Muir Absence of occupation is not rest; A mind quite vacant is a mind distressed. â¢William Cowper No rest is worth anything except the rest that is earned. â¢Jean Paul Sundays, quiet islands on the tossing seas of life. â¢S. W. Duffield Rest is the sweet sauce of labor. â¢Plutarch I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy! â¢Louise A. Bogan A friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out. â¢Walter Winchell One dog barks at something, the rest bark at him. â¢Chinese Proverb How beautiful is it to do nothing, and then rest afterward. â¢Proverb The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing.
No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.
No one is satisfied with his fortune, nor dissatisfied with his intellect. [Fr., Nul n'est content de sa fortune; Ni mecontent de son esprit.]
Most people say that is it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.
Sensual pleasures are like soap bubbles, sparkling, effervescent. The pleasures of intellect are calm, beautiful, sublime, ever enduring and climbing upward to the borders of the unseen world.
Sentiment is intellectualized emotion; emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy.
Sentiment is intellectualized emotion; emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy.
When I have attempted to join myself to others by services, it proved an intellectual trick,--no more. They eat your service like apples, and leave you out. But love them, and they feel you, and delight in you all the time.
If I say that Shakespeare is the greatest of intellects, I have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare's intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious intellect; there is more virtue in it that he himself is aware of.
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.
Great intellects are skeptical.
The collective matrix of a science at a given time is determined by a kind of establishment, which includes universities, learned societies, and, more recently, the editorial offices of technical journals. Like other establishments, they are consciously or unconsciously bent on preserving the status quo- partly because unorthodox innovations are a threat to their authority, but also because of the deeper fear that their laboriously erected an intellectual edifice might collapse under the impact.
What the intellectual craves above all else is to be taken seriously, to be treated as a decisive force in shaping history. He is far more at home in a society that weighs his every word and keeps close watch on his attitudes then in a society that cares not what he says or does. He would rather be persecuted than ignored.
We know that words cannot move mountains, but they can move the multitude; and men are more ready to fight and die for a word than for anything else. Words shape thought, stir feeling, and beget action; they kill and revive, corrupt and cure. The "men-of-words"- priests, prophets, intellectuals- have played a more decisive role in history than military leaders, statesmen, and businessmen.
One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.
Where intellectuals have played a role in history, it has not been so much by whispering words of advice into the ears of political overlords as by contributing to the vast and powerful currents of conceptions and misconceptions that sweep human action along.
The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.
A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual"- find out how he feels about astrology.
The biggest mischief in the past century has been perpetrated by Rousseau with his doctrine of the goodness of human nature. The mob and the intellectuals derived from it the vision of a Golden Age which would arrive without fail once the noble human race could act according to its whims.
