Quotes About Intellect

Not in vain is Ireland pouring itself all over the earth. The Irish, with their glowing hearts and reverent credulity, are needed in this cold age of intellect and skepticism.

My own opinion is that youthfulness of feeling is retained, as is youthfulness of appearance, by constant use of the intellect.

Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.

We explain by means of purely intellectual processes, but we understand by means of the cooperation of all the powers of the mind in comprehension. In understanding we start from the connection of the given, living whole, in order to make the past comprehensible in terms of it.

One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas.

The English intellect is sound, so far as it goes,but it has one grave defect--it is always cautious in the wrong place.

A young man who plays his part in society by looking on in green spectacles, and listening with a sickly smile, may be a prodigy of intellect and a mine of virtue, but he is hardly, perhaps, the right sort of man to have at a picnic.

In books we converse with the wise, as in action with fools. That is, if we know how to select our books. Some books are to be tasted, reads a famous passage, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; all these groups forming, no doubt, an infinitesimal portion of the oceans and cataracts of ink in which the world is daily bathed and poisoned and drowned.

The first lesson that the sages of the Upanishads teach their selected pupils is the inadequacy of the intellect. How can this feeble brain, that aches at a little calculus, ever hope to understand the complex immensity of which it is so transitory a fragment?

In books "we converse with the wise, as in action with fools." That is, if we know how to select our books. "Some books are to be tasted," reads a famous passage, "others to be swallowed, and some to be chewed and digested"; all these groups forming, no doubt, an infinitesimal portion of the oceans and cataracts of ink in which the world is daily bathed and poisoned and drowned.

Reason is man's imitation of divinity.

Seek ye first the good things of the mind," Bacon admonishes us, "and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt."2 Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free.

What if the proper functioning of the intellect and philosophy is not the denial of the will (desire) but the coordination of desires into a united and harmonious will?

On his tombstone only three words were necessary:   HERE LIES VOLTAIRE

It is difficult to be enthusiastic about Aristotle, because it was difficult for him to be enthusiastic about anything. His motto is nil admirari - to admire or marvel at nothing.

The cleverest defenders of a faith are its greatest enemies; for their subtleties engender doubt and stimulate the mind.

No man when conscious attains to true or inspired intuition, but rather when the power of intellect is fettered in sleep or by disease or dementia";

Leonardo called "the noblest pleasure, the joy of understanding.

We must not avoid pleasures, but we must select them." Epicurus, then, is no epicurean; he exalts the joys of intellect rather than those of sense; he warns against pleasures that excite and disturb the soul which they should rather quiet and appease. In the end he proposes to seek not pleasure in its usual sense, but ataraxia—tranquillity, equanimity, repose of mind;

On his tombstone only three words were necessary: HERE LIES VOLTAIRE

Now began the great game of epistemology

Men are admitted into heaven not because they have curbed and governed their passions or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all the passions emanate uncurbed in their eternal glory.

Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

I care not whether a man is Good or Evil; all that I care Is whether he is a Wise man or a Fool. Go! put off Holiness, And put on Intellect; or my thund'rous hammer shall drive thee To wrath, which thou condemnest, till thou obey my voice.