Quotes About Intellect

If I have done great things it's because I was standing in the closet of smart men taking notes and then publishing their ideas as my own.

Yeah, sex is cool, but have you tried solving the brachistochrone problem in a single night?

philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy a civilization....but if professors can truly wield this fatal power, may it not be that only other professors, or, at least, other thinkers can alone disarm them?

Fontenelle was the most civilized man of his time, and indeed of most times.

I had no systematic way of learning but proceeded like a quilt maker, a patch of knowledge here a patch there but lovingly knitted. I would hungrily devour the intellectual scraps and leftovers of the learned.

One summer day, Eugenio Scalfari and I created an entire philosophical system: the philosophy of the élan vital . The next day we discovered that it had already been invented by Bergson.

However vast any person's basic reading may be, there still remain an enormous number of fundamental works that he has not read.

The leader who intends to grow spiritually and intellectually will be reading constantly.

When, despite considerable intelligence, a thinker cannot think straight, it becomes very likely that he cannot face his thoughts.

I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.

The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another.

We already use catchwords as substitutes for thinking, thereby limiting our vocabulary along with the use of our brains. In

We are here for knowledge. Our enemy is thoughtlessness. This is philosophy.

Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits.

The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." —Mark Twain

I have always maintained that excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work. —Charles Darwin

A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.

Unless we recognize a higher power to whom we are responsible and who observes and knows our actions, we will not transcend the selfishness of our character and the subjectivity of our intellect. If each person is the final arbiter of right and wrong, then 'right' for him or her will be what he or she desires, regardless of its consequences for the other inhabitants of Earth.

Unless you have a hundred unanswered questions in your mind you haven't read enough...

The concept of reason itself appears as an artificial attempt to separate intellectual powers from the frustrations, emotions, and accidents which cause events; the concept of reason is viewed as facade to prevent change.

To assume that someone's views are invariably influenced or shaped by his or her partner is lazy. It is an intellectual crutch we grope for when we do not have an effective counter to someone's argument.

But does that mean that war and violence are inevitable? I would argue not because we have also evolved this amazingly sophisticated intellect, and we are capable of controlling our innate behavior a lot of the time.

The violent quarrel between the abstractionists and the surrealists seems to me quite unnecessary. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious.

It's obvious, but perhaps worth saying, that happiness has virtually nothing to do with the state of your intellect.