Quotes About Intellect

He thinks like a philosopher, but governs like a king.

La pensée est le réveil du sens.

Spiritual Autolysis—trying to write something true and keeping at it until you do—is the best possible way of identifying and eradicating our falseness because the process of writing minimizes the weaknesses and maximizes the strengths of the intellect. Nothing false can survive illumination by a steady and focused mind.

Jeff Goldblum

Movies, Burroughs continued, would be the ruin of the American intellect: "The average person goes to the moving-picture theater and looks at senseless films for a couple of hours, and goes away without having really had to use his brain once. . . . In the old days, he might have been spending that time with a book before him, which would have given him more information and would have made him exercise his brain a little to get it.

the brain is like a muscle, and if you don't exercise it by reading and doing creative stuff, it'll get weak and mushy.

Expect to feel pleasure. Knowledge is sexy. Expect to feel pain. Knowledge is torture.

It might be inexplicable. It might be beyond the limits of my senses to capture—or my science or my intellect—but I still believed I was in the presence of some kind of living creature, one that practiced mimicry using my own thoughts. For even then, I believed that it might be pulling these different impressions of itself from my mind and projecting them back at me, as a form of camouflage.

The linguist still believed in the superstition of logic

But intellect does not inform matters of the heart. Regrets

Negro ideas. But they were just ideas, free-floating and of no color at all.

She did not need a library; she was a library.

My spiritual investigations interest my sister mostly from a point of intellectual curiosity. 'I think that kind of faith is so beautiful,' she whispers to me in the church, 'but I can't do it, I just can't...

For Alma, to read something once was to have ownership of it forever. She could take apart an argument the way a good soldier can dismantle his rifle—half asleep in the dark, and the thing still comes to pieces beautifully. Calculus put her into fits of ecstasies. Grammar was an old friend—perhaps from having grown up speaking so many languages simultaneously.

I like a puzzle, as you know. So does every scholar worth his salt. It's the reward of the business, to look history in the eye and say, 'I know who you are. You can't fool me'.

No I like a puzzle, as you know. So does every scholar worth his salt. It's the reward of the business, to look history in the eye and say, 'I know who you are. You can't fool me.

the artes liberales: music, mathematics, history, and so on.

Americans have many admirable characteristics, but literary taste is rare among them.

To each other, they talked at a gallop. Literature turned them on; their ideas flowed, ran back and forth like a current. (The Cousins)

The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, our perceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday the body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.

Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.

The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.