Quotes About Intellect

young man who set out to study the Talmud, not because he had the slightest interest in God but because he was curious about its internal contradictions.

Inside him a quality and a chemical—intelligence and testosterone—wrestled for hegemony.

the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.

Amos approached intellectual life strategically, as if it were an oil field to be drilled, and after two years of sitting through philosophy classes he announced that philosophy was a dry well. "I remember his words," recalled Amnon. "He said, 'There is nothing we can do in philosophy. Plato solved too many of the problems. We can't have any impact in this area. There are too many smart guys and too few problems left, and the problems have no solutions.

You know when you're with someone who is intellectually powerful: You just know it.

In disposition the Negro is joyous, flexible, and indolent; while the many nations which compose this race present a singular diversity of intellectual character, of which the far extreme is the lowest grade of humanity.

Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.

Judgment is more than skill. It sets forth on intellectual seas beyond the shores of hard indisputable factual information.

Agatha Christie's writing is incredibly skillful because her books are incredibly intellectually puzzling and challenging.

There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them.

There are some places you love with your heart, and there are some places that you love with your mind- the places that you love with both are called 'libraries'

I read everything and anything. I love books.

The learned are seldom pretty fellows, and in many cases their appearance tends to discourage a love of study in the young.

I love this idea of trying to create that intellectual eroticism. That was what I was working toward all along.

I love reading fiction about people who are connecting intellectually. I find that exhilarating.

It's not really rewarding trying to fathom what people will think. Particularly people who have demonstrated a lifetime aversion to thinking.

18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.

the aforementioned Murchison, who spent the first thirty or so years of his life galloping after foxes, converting aeronautically challenged birds into puffs of drifting feathers with buckshot, and showing no mental agility whatever beyond that needed to read The Times or play a hand of cards. Then he discovered an interest in rocks and became with rather astounding swiftness a titan of geological thinking.

It's the main thing I do in my life. I read and I chew glasses. That's my job. -- WSJ interview, 9/10/19

I do admit there are things in the universe I don't understand. But my response to that is not to make up silly stories...or to believe intellectually embarrassing myths from the Bronze Age, but you believe whatever you want.

If a fourteen year-old can deliver your message, it's not because he's gifted. It's because intellectually, you're a child.

After all, is a gentleman's library of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves anything more than a vanity?

There is nothing so consistent with reason as this denial of reason.

The end point of rationality is to demonstrate the limits of rationality