Quotes About Intellect

We should have pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will

When I pass a bookshelf, I like to pick out a book from it and thumb through it. When I see a newspaper on the couch, I like to sit down with it.... Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person.

Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on.

Every professor worth his PhD should have a fireplace in his study.

So, the image to start. The perception of the world as it is, the phantasm, the flare of the visionary idea is flattened to a page by the male intellect. Controlled, categorized, c-a-t-a-l-o-g-u-e-d. The ethereal is quashed. Address, that beautiful oration announcing itself, becomes a dress feebly worn, becomes a picture of a dress in a catalogue.

The mass media causes sexual misdirection: It prompts us to need something deeper than what we want. This is why Woody Allen has made nebbish guys cool; he makes people assume there is something profound about having a relationship based on witty conversation and intellectual discourse. There isn't. It's just another gimmick, and it's no different than wanting to be with someone because they're thin or rich or the former lead singer of Whiskeytown.

Ignorance is not bliss. That platitude is totally wrong. You will not be intellectually happier if you know fewer things. Learning should be a primary goal of living. But what if ignorance feels better—not psychologically, but physically? That would explain a lot of human incongruities.

they should let some people into the library by prescription only

The democracy of capitalism guaranteed that only the most banal men, the men with the most moderate intellect and most readily appealing looks and talents, would rise to notoriety. And these would only be a handful from among the millions.

It is only after the intellect collapses that any true communication exists.

The church hates a thinker precisely for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff, or a thief despises the prosecuting witness.

What is sweeter than lettered ease?

There is nothing so absurd that it has not been said by some philosopher.

There have been times when only a hair's-breadth has intervened betwixt myself and the seething devil-ridden world of madness; for the hideous knowledge, the horror- blackened memories which I have carried so long, were never meant to be borne by the human intellect.

Urizen is the chief villain always, because Urizen is not merely intellect; he is also personality, identity, the Spectre. As soon as man begins to think, he forms a notion of who he is. If man were entirely body or emotions, he would have no conception of his identity, consequently he could never become unbalanced like Nijinsky, Lawrence, Van Gogh. It is Urizen who starts the trouble. The Bible recounts the same legend when it ascribes the first discord in the universe to Lucifer and his pride

he has explored life from end to end and found it all hollow, when actually he is only constipated with his own worthless-ness. He fails to apply his intellect to the question, Why do all living things prefer life to death?

Ultimate meaning necessarily exceeds and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man... What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. Logos is deeper than logic.

Logos is deeper than logic.

The average human's mind was a tidal wave of contradictory emotions unbounded by intellect or calculation. Love, hate, fear, greed, lust—all fighting for dominance, advancing and retreating, controlling and justifying every action and reaction.

She read everything.

Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.

But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the teashop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him- he could not feel. He could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily…he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then- that he could not feel.

Books - books - books, said Helen, in her absent-minded way. More new books - I wonder what you find in them...

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?