Quotes About Intellect

His early researches were pursued partly in the spirit of a young gentleman's entertainment, which happened to be science instead of fighting or politics or gambling.

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.

[Science is] the desire to know causes.

The seat of knowledge is in the head, of wisdom, in the heart.

Learning is its own exceeding great reward.

I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.

Novelists and historians have known for centuries that people do not deploy the powerful human intellect to dispassionately analyze the world, but rather to rationalize how the facts conform to their emotionally derived preconceptions.

William J. Bouwsma

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

I feel as though I am swimming in an ocean of knowledge with but a teaspoon to consume it.

Her genius derives from the fact that she was capable of the deepest feeling but also of the most discerning and disciplined thought.

Academics don't normally manage to alter people's way of thinking through their strength of argument.

I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

Day after day we read about them, each new man more brilliant than the last. They were not just an all-star first team, but an all-star second team as well. There were counts kept on how many Rhodes scholars there were in the Administration, how many books by members of the new Administration (even the Postmaster, J. Edward Day, had written a novel, albeit a bad one).

We seemed about to enter an Olympian age in this country, brains and intellect harnessed to great force, the better to define a common good... It seems long ago now, that excitement which swept through the country, or at least the intellectual reaches of it, that feeling that America was going to change, that the government had been handed down from the tired, flabby chamber-of-commerce mentality of the Eisenhower years to the best and brightest of a generation.

The feelings of our heart, the agitation of our passions, the vehemence of our affections, dissipate all its conclusions, and reduce the profound philosopher to a mere plebeian

Reasonable men may be allowed to differ where no one can reasonably be positive: Opposite sentiments, even without any decision, afford an agreeable amusement; and if the subject be curious and interesting, the book carries us, in a manner, into company, and unites the two greatest and purest pleasures of human life: study and society.

For if truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, it is certain it must lie very deep and abstruse: and to hope we shall arrive at it without pains, while the greatest geniuses have failed with the utmost pains, must certainly be esteemed sufficiently vain and presumptuous.

It is well known, that, in all questions submitted to the understanding, prejudice is destructive of sound judgment, and perverts all operations of the intellectual faculties: it is no less contrary to good taste; nor has it less influence to corrupt our sentiment of beauty. It belongs to good sense to check its influence in both cases.

Tis not solely in poerty and music, we must follow low our taste and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy (Hume, 1739, p.153).

David Ionovich Bronstein

When the noise died down, she could lose herself in mathematics—in attempts to combine quantum mechanics with the theory of relativity—and forget the world around her.

Încrederea exagerat? în propria capacitate ne expune riscurilor ?i ne împiedic? s? evolu?m. Îndoiala de sine joac? un rol decisiv pentru maturitatea noastr? intelectual?.

One thing I learned on my sporadic spiritual journey was that mainstream culture's disdain and disrespect for the intellectual integrity of Christianity is unwarranted, and its conceited assumption that Christian beliefs are a product of blind faith, bereft of reason and intellect, is completely false.