Quotes About Intellect

Among physicists, I'm respected I hope.

I had the idea that it would be wonderful to be a physicist or a mathematician maybe 500 years ago around the time of Newton when there were really fundamental things just lying around to be discovered.

I remember being in strong physics, physiology and biology classes.

Surely there is grandeur in knowing that in the realm of thought, at least, you are without a chain; that you have the right to explore all heights and depth; that there are no walls nor fences, nor prohibited places, nor sacred corners in all the vast expanse of thought.

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

Have you ever seen a pedant with a warm heart?

What we have to remember is we want to utilize the tremendous intellect that we have in the military to win wars. I've talked to a lot of the generals, a lot of our advanced people. And believe me, if we gave them the mission, which is what the commander-in-chief does, they would be able to carry it out.

Wars, however frequent and destructive they may be, have never been able to kill entirely the intellectual and moral sense which raises man above the beast.

We benefit, intellectually and personally, from the interplay between different selves, from the balance between long-term contemplation and short-term impulse. We should be wary about tipping the scales too far. The community of selves shouldn't be a democracy, but it shouldn't be a dictatorship, either.

What I love about L.A. and Washington, D.C. is that they're almost the opposite of each other. L.A. is a very creative space while D.C. is a very cerebral space. So, they're the ying and the yang in my world. I like them both for their own reasons.

He chuckled into my hair, enjoying this. I loved him terribly just then, how he puzzled through obscure scholarship and reveled in ideas, never mind that he'd called my mind hell.

You often show yourself without any faculty of deductive reasoning.

Animals have attained such perfection in their existence, while man has never known such tranquility. I have always believed that animals listen to one perfect voice — nature's voice — and do as it bids them. We, on the other hand, listen only to ourselves, and we do as we please. Our ego, our pride, is generally our instructor, instead of reality, intellect, or even common sense. We live our lives superficially, led by our personalities.

In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.

The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

A man's library is a sort of harem.

Sorrow makes us all children again — destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

The scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state he is Man Thinking.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

What is the hardest thing in the world To think.

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

How can the intellect which can never reach the Self be competent to ascertain, and much less decide the nature of the final state of Realization? It is like trying to measure the sunlight at its source by the standard of the light given by a candle. The wax will melt down before the candle comes anywhere near

Questioner: Is an intellectual understanding of the Truth necessary? Maharshi: Yes. Otherwise why does not the person realise God or the Self at once, ie. as soon as he is told that God is all or the Self is all? That shows some wavering on his part. He must argue with himself and gradually convince himself of the Truth before his faith becomes firm.