Quotes About Intellect

Borrowed wisdom can be vicious. I need to make a huge effort not to be swayed by well-sounding remarks. I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age eighteen.

The fallacy is that what one may need to know in the real world does not necessarily match what one can perceive through intellect: it doesn't mean that details are not relevant, only that those we tend (IYI-style) to believe are important can distract us from more central attributes of the price mechanism.

My motto is "my principal activity is to tease those who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously.

The problem lies in the structure of our minds:

We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion.

The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding

When we doubt our minds, we tend to discount its products. If we fear intellectual self-assertiveness, perhaps associating it with loss of love, we mute our intelligence. We dread being visible; so we make ourselves invisible, then suffer because no one sees us.

What is needed and demanded today, in the age of the knowledge worker, is not robotic obedience but persons who can think.

The bookworm of great libraries.

Possibly, he was in a state of second growth and recovery, and was constantly assimilating nutriment for his spirit and intellect from sights, sounds, and events which passed as a perfect void to persons more practised with the world. As all is activity and vicissitude to the new mind of a child, so might it be, likewise, to a mind that had undergone a kind of new creation, after its longsuspended life.

Then, moreover, the white locks of age were sometimes found to be the thatch of an intellectual tenement in good repair.

Externally, the jollity of aged men has much in common with the mirth of children; the intellect, any more than a deep sense of humor, has little to do with the matter; it is, with both, a gleam that plays upon the surface, and imparts a sunny and cheery aspect alike to the green branch, and gray, mouldering trunk.

he seemed to be in quest for mental food, not heart sustenance.

Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these.

But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial: so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum.

There is no instance, in all history, of the human will and intellect having perfected any great moral reform by methods which it adapted to that end; but the progress of the world, at every step, leaves some evil or wrong on the path behind it, which the wisest of mankind, of their own set purpose, could never have found the way to rectify.

Men of uncommon intellect , who have grown morbid, possess this occasional power of mighty effort, into which they throw the life of many days, and then are lifeless for as many more.

La s?n?tatea moral? È™i intelectual? a unui om contribuie mult leg?turile de camaraderie cu oameni deosebiÈ›i de el, pe care nu-i prea intereseaz? È›elurile lui È™i care îl oblig? s? fac? un efort mintal pentru a le aprecia aptitudinile È™i sfera de preocup?ri.

Thus Ethan Brand become a fiend. He began to be so from the moment that his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his intellect. And now, as his highest effort and inevitable development -- as the bright and gorgeous flower, and rich, delicious fruit of his life's labor -- had had produced the Unpardonable Sin!

Thus Ethan Brand become a fiend. He began to be so from the moment that his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his intellect. And now, as his highest effort and inevitable development -- as the bright and gorgeous flower, and rich, delicious fruit of his life's labor -- he had produced the Unpardonable Sin!

At almost every step in life, we meet with young men of just about Holgrave's age, for whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, even after mucha nd careful inquiry, we never happen to hear another word. The effervescence of youth and passion, and the fresh gloss of the intellect and imagination, endow them with a false brilliancy, which makes fools of themselves and other people.

a bookworm-one of those men who are born to gnaw dead thoughts. His clothes, you see, are covered with the dust of libraries. He has no inward fountain of ideas... - Earth's Holocaust, Hawthorne

The fact that it was not human meant that it could never understand certain things, in spite of its immense empathy and intellect. It couldn't comprehend, for instance, that the terror of the unknown was just as awful, and just as real, regardless of whether or not there was truly something to fear.

By a fatal law, a genius is always an idiot.