Quotes About Intellect

The average man's opinions are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself.

A gourmet is just a glutton with brains.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.

The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.

Leonard Woolf in a letter to Lytton Strachey said he hated John Maynard Keynes "for his crass stupidity and hideous face".

Man is a reasoning, rather than a reasonable animal.

When you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don't mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met and spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to feel any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel I ought to - like the Labour M.P.s who get patted on the back by dukes and are lost forever more.

If his presidency is to represent the full power of the idea that black Americans are just like everyone else - fully human and fully capable of intellect, courage and patriotism - then Barack Obama has to be subject to the same rough and tumble of political criticism experienced by his predecessors.

I'm turned on by guys who are cultured. That'll keep me intrigued. They don't have to have a single degree, but they should speak other languages or know things about other parts of the world or history or certain artists or musicians. I like to be taught. I like to sit on that side of the table.

The human mind, as it turns out, is messy.

I've always considered myself to look like a rather plain-and-exhausted bluestocking, so it's rather odd to read Tweets commenting on my appearance.

When he was twenty-three or twenty-four my father began to learn German and read philosophy in his spare hours, which did not look as though he were destined to remain long on board ship!

I feel nervous because I revere [Zadie Smith] so much. I don't want to be stupid. If I say something stupid, just interrupt me.

Wants awaken intellect. To gratify them disciplines intellect. The keener the want the lustier the growth.

The bad guys I play don't want to be bad. It's the struggle between the part of them that's an animal and the part that's the intellect that's interesting.

Besides one should not believe that the people only want reading that is easy to absorb.

Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable.

I wanted to see who this Yeats person was, and I said to my mother, 'I want a book by this person.' And she bought it for me, and a lot of it was over my head, but I had it.

There is no need for propaganda to be rich in intellectual content.

Once one assumes an attitude of intolerance, there is no knowing where it will take one. Intolerance, someone has said, is violence to the intellect and hatred is violence to the heart.

Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.

I wished I could take every course in the curriculum and read every book in the library. Sometimes after I finished a particularly good book, I had the urge to get the library card, find out who else read the book, and track them down to talk about it.

It was a bitch living with your old English teacher, especially when your old English teacher wasn't old at all, and he had exactly the kind of body that most appealed to her, tall and lean, broad in the shoulder, narrow at the hip. Then there was his brain. It had taken her a lot of years to find that particular part of a man appealing, but she'd finally gotten in the habit, and she couldn't seem to give it up.

Intellectually we know all we need to know, technologically we could remedy our plight starting today, but inertia and vested interests rule.