Quotes About Intellect

Logic matters. It leads us from simple ideas to surprising conclusions.

Facts, however numerous, do not constitute a science. Like innumerable grains of sand on the sea shore, single facts appear isolated, useless, shapeless; it is only when compared, when arranged in their natural relations, when crystallized by the intellect, that they constitute the eternal truths of science.

You can see the fingerprints of the adjacent possible in one of the most remarkable patterns in all of intellectual history, what scholars now call "the multiple": A brilliant idea occurs to a scientist or inventor somewhere in the world, and he goes public with his remarkable finding, only to discover that three other minds had independently come up with the same idea in the past year.

John Locke first began maintaining a commonplace book in 1652, during

SLIDE RULE (1632)

CALCULUS (1684, 1693)

Los innovadores legendarios, como Franklin, Snow y Darwin, poseen unas cualidades intelectuales comunes –cierta rapidez mental y una curiosidad sin límites–, pero también comparten otra característica: tienen un montón de aficiones.

reason, by itself, is just a means of getting from one true proposition to the next and does not care about the value of those propositions.

cuando las personas aumentan su curiosidad intelectual y su cultura científica, dejan de creer en milagros.

PHILOSOPHY TODAY GETS no respect. Many scientists use the term as a synonym for effete speculation. When my colleague Ned Block told his father that he would major in the subject, his father's reply was "Luft!"—Yiddish for "air." And then there's the joke in which a young man told his mother he would become a Doctor of Philosophy and she said, "Wonderful! But what kind of disease is philosophy?

If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers.

PHILOSOPHY TODAY GETS no respect.

El sometimiento de todas nuestras creencias a los juicios de la razón y las evidencias es una destreza antinatural, como la alfabetización y el cálculo, y ha de ser inculcada y cultivada.

There is no worse torture than knowing intellectually about love and the way.

You fall in love with people's minds.

Just as the light of the sun attracts a healthy eye, so through love knowledge of God naturally draws to itself a pure intellect.

I love to read. My education is self-inflicted

You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.

Love can attain what the intellect cannot fathom.

What if you love knowledge for its own sake, not necessarily as a blueprint to action? What if you wish there were more, not fewer reflective types in the world?

I love chess, but it's the height of decadence.

You should be able to use your intellect and not to be dominated by your intellect.

There is nothing better than being in a classroom with really, really brilliant students, and opening up new worlds to them. That's what I love doing.

There's a lot of things I nerd out over. Quantum Mechanics. I also love Dungeons and Dragons. I want to be an astronaut.