Quotes About Intellect

In a more intellectually rigorous age, I wouldn't be talked about as a satirist at all. I would just be a topical comedian.

Read books and keep informed. The conversation can get old if you don't have some good new topics to bring to the table.

Less than fifteen per cent of the people do any original thinking on any subject. The greatest torture in the world for most people is to think.

Bowie talks in great, voluble torrents, darting from one topic to the next, parenthesizing and then parenthesizing the parentheses, as if he has too many ideas for one conversation.

What is philosophy? Albrecht Wellmer, I say, or John McDowell. This is how I know what philosophy is.

And math to me is just a training course to be a citizen, how to think in the world.

Great minds may have cold hearts. Form but no color. It is an incompleteness. And so they are afraid of any woman who both thinks and feels deeply.

There is no genius free from some tincture of madness.

The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.

History remembers Abe's towering intellect but forgets that, in those days, he was more towering than intellectual.

I don't want to struggle to describe things anymore. I want to let experience happen without the filter of intellect.

Nothing bothers me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.

The Islamic intellectual tradition has usually not seen a dichotomy between intellect and intuition but has created a hierarchy of knowledge and methods of attaining knowledge according to which degrees of both intellection and intuition become harmonized in an order encompassing all the means available to man to know, from sensual knowledge an reason to intellection and inner version or the "knowledge of the heart.

When does he ever think?" Richard straddled a chair and accepted a wind cup from Raoul. "If he were to sell his brain, he could claim it had never been used.", Chapter 7

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A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.

What was so odd was that quite a lot of people, not just sheep but highly intelligent people, did apparently believe it. T. S. Eliot, for instance. Or Eddington—in fact, quite a few physicists, the very last people one would expect to be taken in by it. Philosophers, too. Was it possible—was there any chance—that there was more to it than I had thought? No, certainly not. Of course not! Still, it was odd. Damned odd.

Be very suspicious of anyone who does not have books at home or in the office, or who stammers when you ask them about the last thing they read.

The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges.

Since the time of Plato and Aristotle philosophers have had an interest in taking note of common fallacies in reasoning.

You propound a complicated arithmetical problem: say cubing a number containing four digits. Give me a slate and half an hour's time, and I can produce a wrong answer.

I listen to Radio 4 all the time. I didn't go to university, so that's my further education.

I think you can be athletic and intellectual at the same time.

I am more or less reading all the time.