Quotes About Intellect

Beauty isn't worth thinking about; what's important is your mind. You don't want a fifty-dollar haircut on a fifty-cent head. ~Garrison Keillor

The girl I find who wants to talk about quantum theory in a bar is the one I want to marry.

How New York has fallen off during the last forty years! Its intellect and culture have been diluted and swamped by a great flood-tide of material wealth … men whose bank accounts are all they rely on for social position and influence.

assumed both the capability and the fallibility of human reason.

Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.

centering is what will allow you to let go of the need for your ego-intellect to control and explain everything. Centering

Robert Heinlein once put it . . . Man is a rationalizing animal not a rational one.

Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.

Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.

I may not be an explorer, or an adventurer, or a treasure seeker, or a gunfighter, Mr. O'Connell, but I am proud of what I am. ... I am a librarian ... ! Stephen Sommers (The Mummy, 1999. Line spoken by Rachel Weisz as Evie Carnahan)

True courage is more a matter of intellect than of feeling.

The arts can sharpen the vision, quicken the intellect, preserve the memory, activate the conscience, enhance the understanding and refresh the language.

it is not the lack of wit or intellect that shallow men crave [in women], it is lack of personality; they desire a woman who will exist only as a shadow to themselves, because this gives them the illusion that they have some importance, that they are more than cattle.

If I had my druthers, I would be a brain in a jar, with a burlap skirt around the cart I'm on - I don't attend to my physical being much.

The more cerebral, slightly darker comedy stuff is where I love to live.

I'm against sloppy, emotional thinking.

I love reading religious authors. Especially in the sort of circle I move in, people tend to be more secular, and I love reading books by just really smart people of religious faith. It's always a really cool perspective.

In the course of my research, I've read a lot of incredibly bad books - mostly by academics. I'm puzzled as to just why their writing is so terrible. These are smart people, after all.

I like George Will, I don't agree with him particularly, but he's probably the smartest conservative out there.

Smell is a very animal thing, almost reptilian, where the more cerebral things like reading less so.

I read a book every night. I really am that nerd, so when I get to go to the Smithsonian and get to go in the back rooms and play with stuff, things like that, for a guy like me, that's amazing.

Literary readings aren't going to shake their reputation as the added-fibre of our entertainment diet until the people who organize and participate in them snap out of this mentality.

I believe in a world where there are no heroes, and I've read and know humanity a lot. There are moments that I admire in a person courage, intellect, hard work. These are the qualities I admire in an intellectual, in a writer, and there are so many people who have these things.

The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.