Quotes About Intellectual

One would prefer a physical trouble which would produce outspoken feeblemindedness with its limited range of harmful effects to this encephalitis which may produce an intellectual, tormented and cruel monster out of a gentle girl or boy

Although Erc was bitterly disappointed, there was another route to prestige. He possessed gifts of the mind sufficient to gain admittance to the order of Druids, the intellectual class of Celtic society. Members of the order were not practitioners of a specific religion, nor were they priests in the Christian sense of the word. The Greeks were more nearly correct by describing Druids as poet-philosophers.

The scholastic method encouraged subtlety, intellectual agility, a sharpening of scholarly wits. It provoked a rage for philosophy, which occupied the schools at the expense of humanistic and scientific studies. Compromising by nature, it did not lead to the discovery of great final truths. It led, rather, to aridity, spiritual casuistry, and, with its ever more fine-spun distinctions, to absurdity.

Though Leibniz may have had special reasons for considering base two, neither this base nor any other had until recently been seriously considered as a substitute for base ten. In fact, aside from incidental uses of other bases in higher mathematics to facilitate an occasional proof, the subject of bases other than ten was regarded until recently as an intellectual amusement.

And if an essential thing has flown between us, rare intellectual bird of communication, let us seize it quickly : let our preference choose it instead of softer things to screen us each from the other's self : muteness or hesitation, nor petrify live miracle by our indifference.

The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.

No one in any generation has ever identified himself intellectually with the masses. Therefore, it seems like an abstract word that does not exist or we all pretend to be smarter than it looks.

The purpose of an open mind, [Chesterton] said, is like the purpose of an open mouth: that it might be shut again on something solid. Yes, we must be free to ask questions. But when we hear a good answer we must be prepared to recognize it as such, and not be so keen on keeping all the questions open that we shy away from an answer because we so like having an open mind. That is the way to intellectual, as well as spiritual, starvation.

A church without sermons will soon have a shrivelled mind, then a wayward heart, next an unquiet soul, and finally misdirected strength. A church without sacraments will find its strength cut off, its soul undernourished, its heart prey to conflicting emotions, and its mind engaged in increasingly irrelevant intellectual games.

Things got said, the kinds of embarrassing things that don't go away. Tempers ran high. My paternal grandfather's teak desk required a new panel, which never quite matched the others. Intellectual debate can be very hard on furniture.

We need to understand enough of modern thought to identify the ways it blocks us from living out the Gospel the way God intends, both in terms of intellectual roadblocks and in terms of economic and structural changes that make it harder to live by Scriptural principles.

This reality orientation is the positive intellectual climate in which the core propositions and events of the gospel live and breathe. It is a mentality in which people are liberated by verifiable truth to challenge tradition, question power, and fight for life and healing against death and decay.

In Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata, the first of Japan's two Nobel laureates, describes the sad and sorry love affair of a geisha from the country and an intellectual from the city. It's

diversity can result in a more rigorous intellectual outcome by fostering critical interrogations that reveal embedded social prejudice.

The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.

Most people don't realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?

As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were embedded. Coleridge's famous line about water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment: In a sea of information, there was very little of it to use.

Without intellectual privacy, then, we risk a world in which new political ideas are hard to come by, and in which we and our fellow citizens are less able to come to terms with what we believe. Without intellectual privacy, meaningful democratic self-government itself is at risk.

I'm not a natural leader. I'm too intellectual I'm too abstract I think too much.

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Perpetually restless, Thomas Wolfe was "without a home — a vagabond since [he] was seven" and seeking out where he belonged physically (i.e. in Asheville, his home or Harvard) as well as intellectually. This concept that he was indeed without a father led him to gain greater understanding, eventually realizing that his search for a patriarch was not merely a "father in the flesh," but a substitution for God, a guiding light, and an alluring source of inspiration.

Their words also make it a lot easier for people to justify that shift -- to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought. In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable, Federman and Shirky provide the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably in the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life.

When it comes to the quality of our thought, our neurons and synapses are entirely indifferent. The possibility of intellectual decay is inherent in the malleability of our brains.

As we multitask online, he says, we are "training our brains to pay attention to the crap." The consequences for our intellectual lives may prove "deadly."54