Quotes About Intellect

It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life.

A magazine or a newspaper is a shop. Each is an experiment and represents a new focus, a new ratio between commerce and intellect.

Think until it hurts.

Harvard is the home of American ideas.

I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.

People become dons because they are incapable of doing anything else in life.

There are two parts in our nature, the baser, which consists of our senses and passions, and the more noble and rational, which is properly the human part, the other being common to us with brutes.

many of these excellent young people could not, as a general rule, either read or write, as these activities are understood in our best universities.

I am not smart. I try to observe. Millions saw the apple fall but Newton was the one who asked why.

Thinking is one of the greatest pleasures of the human race.

Proof seduces them. One of the greatest pleasures of the human race is thinking.

Das Denken gehört zu den größten Vergnügungen der menschlichen Rasse.

La verità riesce ad imporsi solo nella misura in cui noi la imponiamo; la vittoria della ragione non può essere che la vittoria di coloro che ragionano.

Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.

Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, the chief glory of man.

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do.

This is patently absurd but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

Anyone who has reached a certain stage of intellectual knowledge will recognise the unity of mankind.... That intellectual recognition of the unity is practically universal among educated people; but very few are prepared to carry out the intellectual recognition into practical life and practical training.

Yoga is a matter of the Spirit and not of the intellect. For just as water will find its way through every obstruction, in order to rise to the level of its source, so does the spirit in man strive upwards ever towards the source whence it came.

But we see how these ideas colour men's thoughts and lives, how they cripple their intellect and outrage their hearts, and we rise to trample down these superstitions, not because they are in themselves worth refuting, but simply because they degrade our brother-men.

What is genius, anyway, if it isn't the ability to give an adequate response to a great challenge