Quotes About Intellect

It is the mark of an educated man to be able to evaluate a thought without accepting it. ARISTOTLE

At the higher realms of rationality, even reason can begin to appear irrational.

Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

Those who cannot attack the thought, instead attack the thinker.

Admirable man, who know teeth by dreams, think you that all those of philosophers are decayed?

History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect.

Qui ne peut attaquer le raisonnement, attaque le raisonneur.

one hallmark of intellect is the ability to simplify, to make the complex easy to understand. Anyone can be unclear. The way to credibility is to speak and write plainly without language that bewilders or misleads.

Though outwardly Kristina maintained that a clean room was a symptom of a diseased mind (for how could she, while studying the world's greatest thinkers, be bothered with such mundane earthly issues as cleaning?), inwardly she hated untidyness and made a point of spending as little time in the room as possible.

assert the primacy of thought over ritual

Perhaps his greatest lesson is that philosophical rigor does not have to be pedantic.

Read good, big important things.

Understanding makes the mind lazy.

Whereas you have someone like Houdini, who works really, really hard to get really, really famous, and then has actual intellectual ideas that he puts into the culture that stay there.

Obedience indeed is only the pitiful and cowardly egotism of him who thinks that he can do something better than reason.

I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity.

Intellectually, they knew a great deal. Practically, they chose to know almost nothing.

I need Sunday morning centered on what is transrational, the fundamental Christian mysteries of incarnation and resurrection, the very heartbeat of Christian faith. Not irrational or unworthy of discussion and debate, but that which, when the intellectual dust has cleared, is ultimately beyond what our minds can grasp. I need a God bigger than my arguments.

When Christians feel crushed by such "people of God," faith is exposed as something that just doesn't work here and now. And if something doesn't work, intellectual arguments for staying in the faith lose their appeal over time. Why bother?

parted from Freud, aware how much Freud disliked emotional displays, he spoke lightly about travel plans. Freud, Sachs records, understood

Wir verkümmern, lieber Herr Doktor, weil wir nur noch meinen und nicht mehr denken.

He was a stylist, not a thinker. He spent time trying to say things in as complicated a way as possible.

We can't avoid reasoning; we can only avoid doing it well.

Solomonís wisdom was greater than that of all the men of the East, greater than all the wisdom of Egypt.