Quotes About Intellect

People don't want to be titillated or frightened. They don't want to think.

It was only that his intellect was in such a constant state of multitasking that he seemed to orbit at altitude, separated from those who operated on a more ordinary plane.

We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.

Thought is valuable in proportion as it is generative.

Men are of three different capacities: one understands intuitively; another understands so far as it is explained; and a third understands neither of himself nor by explanation. The first is excellent, the second, commendable, and the third, altogether useless.

Her only love was reason. And that has never been the same as wisdom.

The intellectual support for UNBELIEF is about as stable as the stock market.

Intellectually, he is like interstellar space - a vast vacuum occasionally crossed by homeless, wandering clichés.

Nothing is more common in an age like this, when books abound, than to fancy that the gratification of a love of reading is real study.

In passing however I must say of one thing that has pressed upon me lately and encreased my Humility and capability of submission and that is this truth - Men of Genius are great as certain ethereal Chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral intellect - but they have not any individuality, any determined Character - I would call the top and head of those who have a proper self Men of Power.

Scholars gather in scholarly assemblages to hear in elegant statement what all have heard before. Again, it is not a negligible rite, for its purpose is not to convey knowledge but to beatify learning and the learned.

for the young Louis XV: Philippe II, Duc d'Orléans, was a man who combined a negligible intellect with deeply committed self-indulgence.

We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.

Accordingly, no book can actually embody the knowledge of anything of philosophical importance; only a mind can do that, since only a mind can have this capacity to interpret and reinterpret its own understandings.

And that must end us, that must be our cure: To be no more. Sad cure! For who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through eternity, To perish, rather, swallowed up and lost In the wide womb of uncreated night Devoid of sense and motion?

When you introduce into our schools a spirit of emulation, you have present the keenest spur admissible to the youthful intellect.

Pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber and takes out our brains to make room for it.

I'd always been scared of people with tertiary education and high intellects in case they found me wanting. I thought they viewed me as just a welder who knew a few jokes.

The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns.

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read With loads of learned lumber in his head.

[An educated person:] One who voluntarily does more thinking than is necessary for his own survival.

The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.

Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, produces nothing on the side of genius. When education ends, genius often begins.

Just like my father, I've always loved education. In school I was a member of the honor society.