Quotes About Intellect

The voice of reason is small, but very persistent.

Christopher Hitchens

I have met many brave men and women, morally superior to myself, whose courage in adversity derives from their faith. But whenever they have chosen to speak or write about it, I have found myself appalled by the instant decline of their intellectual and moral standards. They want god on their side and believe they are doing his work--what is this, even at its very best, but an extreme from of solipsism?

Christopher Hitchens

Why did I speak of intellectual courage? Because the human mind, including my own, rebels emotionally against the idea that something as complex as life, and the rest of the expanding universe, could have 'just happened'. It takes intellectual courage to kick yourself out of your emotional incredulity and persuade yourself that there is no other rational choice.

Atheists have the intellectual courage to accept reality for what it is: wonderfully and shockingly explicable. As an atheist, you have the moral courage to live to the full the only life you're ever going to get: to fully inhabit reality, rejoice in it, and do your best finally to leave it better than you found

Faith isn't an act of intelligence, it's an act of imagination. Every time you give them a new metaphor, a mustard seed, a field, a garden, a vineyard, it's like pointing something out to a cat - the cat looks at your finger, not at what you're pointing at. They don't need to understand it, they only need to believe, and they do. They imagine the kingdom as they need it to be, they don't need to grasp it, it's there already, they can let it be. Imagination, not intellect.

Determination is as common among men who are dull and foolish as it is among those who are brilliant intellects.

Emotionalism without intellect from victims without power was how lynch mobs and nationwide hate groups were formed—the basic strategy of fascism, I concluded with a shiver.

You begin to suspect that Cousin-Brother-in-Law and Nyasha are not being honest, that they found each other because neither possesses the hardiness success requires, so they have dressed discouragement up in the glamour of intellect.

The general intellectual level of South Florida is somewhere just above functionally retarded.

A person who won't read books has no advantage over one who can't read books.

The visitor enters and says, What a lot of books! Have you read them all? ...The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: And more, dear sir, many more, which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have fallen back on the riposte: No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office.

There are many things that I do not know because I photocopied a text and then relaxed as if I had read it.

But what use is the unicorn to you if your intellect doesn't believe in it?

The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered.

Las redes sociales le dan el derecho de hablar a legiones de idiotas que antes hablaban sólo en el bar después de un vaso de vino, sin dañar a la comunidad. Entonces eran rápidamente silenciados, pero ahora tienen el mismo derecho a hablar que un Premio Nobel. Es la invasión de los imbéciles

El genio es el que pone en juego uno de esos componentes de manera vertiginosa, alimentándolo con los demás.

Wo er einen Kopf haben sollte, hat er einen alten Bücherschrank. Einen wurmstichigen.

el placer de la erudición está reservado a los perdedores. Cuanto más sabe uno, es que peor le han ido las cosas.

Si los chicos no aprenden esto, que la cultura no es acumulación de saber sino discriminación, no hay educación sino desorden mental.

Good libraries hold several millions of books: even if we read a book a day, we would read only 365 a year, around 3,600 in ten years, and between the ages of ten and eighty we'll have read only 25,200. A trifle.

You should read some Feuerbach

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