Quotes About Intellect

No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

I was reading five or six years ahead of my grade during public school. I was pretty bored. I made a contract with some of my teachers that if I didn't ask too many questions, I could work in the back of the room.

High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.

Most people, Kant continues, are too lazy to think for themselves. They allow guardians of various kinds to think for them, and the guardians are only too happy to take control

An age of enlightenment is one in which people are free to think as their intellect guides them. No body, even the Church, can permanently restrict freedom of thought by prescribing what people must believe, now and for ever.

My parents were both very intellectually honest, straightforward, and for them, faith meant that you were fully engaged.

The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.

when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.

as Sir Joshua Reynolds noted, "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking." With

Another important aspect of our home was respect for ideas.

The question will arise, and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine, 'Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?'

Most of the arguments to which I am party fall somewhat short of being impressive, owing to the fact that neither I nor my opponent knows what we are talking about.

Genius is a plodding intellect, incapable of dreaming up the obstacles that stop the rest of us.

we need to not confuse the intellectual with the emotional (forgiving someone intellectually does not make the energy of anger and pain disappear) - and to not kid ourselves that using the tools allows us to avoid the process.

I am not poor, I am not rich; nihil est, nihil deest, I have little, I want nothing: all my treasure is in Minerva's tower...I live still a collegiate student...and lead a monastic life, ipse mihi theatrum [sufficient entertainment to myself], sequestered from those tumults and troubles of the world...aulae vanitatem, fori ambitionem, ridere mecum soleo [I laugh to myself at the vanities of the court, the intrigues of public life], I laugh at all.

Finch refused to discuss these ideas and didn't brook criticism from his colleagues, much less from a mere photographer. What must it be like, Guilford wondered, to have such a baroque architecture crammed inside one's skull? Such a strange cathedral, so well buttressed, so well defended?

When I left him, I reasoned thus with myself: I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know. —Socrates

The solution is a form of retreat inside ourselves, to the past, to more concentrated forms of thought and action. As Schopenhauer wrote, "Intellect is a magnitude of intensity, not a magnitude of extensity.

Pero haz que la gente se pregunte por qué eres tímido o triste bajo tu desenvuelto ingenio intelectual, y conseguirás su atención. Dale una ambigüedad que le haga ver lo que quiere, atrapa su imaginación con algunos atisbos voyeuristas de tu alma oscura.

Learning never exhausts the mind.—Leonardo da Vinci

But this means that he will be disliked on account of his superiority; and if a man is to be liked, he must really be inferior in point of intellect. ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, 1788–1860