Quotes About Intellect

Lincoln was less well-read than many a professor or journalist, but what he read, he read deeply.

A scholar must not only be capable of hard, often totally resultless work - he must actually relish it.

Poker is good for you. It enriches the soul, sharpens the intellect, heals the spirit, and when played well - nourishes the wallet. Above all else, poker forces the player to face reality and deal with it head-on. [...] Your challenges for as long as you aspire to win at poker is this: Be willing to examine your character and game.

I am thrilled to be alive at time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.

Books appear to be the most immediate instruments of speculative delight.

I attempted in vain to calculate the size of the holdings on the shelves, floor on floor, only to boggle hopelessly, baffled by bibliographic boundlessness.

A university is not a service station. Neither is it a political society, nor a meeting place for political societies. With all its limitations and failures, and they are invariably many, it is the best and most benign side of our society insofar as that society aims to cherish the human mind.

A university's essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism-a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else.

the danger that American society as a whole will over-esteem intellect or assign it such a transcendent value as to displace other legitimate values is one that hardly troubles us.

If mind is seen not as a threat but as a guide to emotion, if intellect is seen neither as a guarantee of character nor as an inevitable danger to it, if theory is conceived as something serviceable but not necessarily subordinate or inferior to practice, and if our democratic aspirations are defined in such realistic and defensible terms as to admit of excellence, all these supposed antagonisms lose their force.

He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing.

It was a high ceilinged room with tall, large-panes windows. Apart from the doorway was the desk where book had been checked out in days when books were still being checked out. He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing.

All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing.

Forest has succumbed to chemically sustained silviculture. Four billion years of evolution, and that's where the matter will end. Politically, practically, emotionally, intellectually: Humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.

When he thundered up the steep staircase [of the institute], two steps at a time, there were few of us younger ones that could keep pace with him. The peace of the library was often broken by a brisk game of pingpong, and I don't remember ever beating Bohr at that game.

trained no fewer than eleven Nobel Prize winners during his life, an unsurpassed record.

So the arguments progressed across the pleasant Berkeley summer. "We were forever inventing new tricks," Bethe says, "finding ways to calculate, and rejecting most of the tricks on the basis of the calculations. Now I could see at first-hand the tremendous intellectual power of Oppenheimer who was the unquestioned leader of our group. . . . The intellectual experience was unforgettable.

In general, we taught that love and action were more important than intellect or speculative truth. Love is the highest category for the Franciscan School (the goal), and we believe that authentic love is not possible without true inner freedom of conscience,18 nor will love be real or tested unless we somehow live close to the disadvantaged (its method), who remind us about what is important.

There was something about educated people that made it impossible for them to admit when they didn't understand something.

This would be especially true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote.

Cognition begins with sensation.

our intellectual quest for truth can never be separated from the cultivation of our moral and aesthetic imagination.

Meg peered at me over the top of her glasses. "You're the dumbest god ever

Powerful men needed their women to be unchallenging, the home should not be an arena for intellectual debate.