Quotes About Intellect

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of physical evidence we have that people are still thinking.

So at about age 10, Albert started to teach himself. He was going to read as much about science as he could.

Vernunft ist die Fähigkeit, objektiv zu denken. Die ihr zugrunde liegende Haltung ist die Demut.

Please let the wind of desire that rose from the multi-coloured spines of those books catch me up again, let it melt the heavy, lifeless lead weight that is there somewhere inside me, and awaken in me once again the impatience of the future, the soaring delight in the world of the intellect – let it carry me back into the ready-for-anything lost world of my youth.

What ever came of the good scholars in the world? —In the hothouse of the school they do enjoy a short semblance of life, but only the more surely to sink back afterward into mediocrity and insignificance. The world has been bettered only by the bad scholars.

No; that doesn't interest me.' 'That's because you never read a book about it.

Happiness in an intelligent person is the rarest thing I know.

Spotted Fawn left a legacy as well. She taught me, and many others, that it's not enough to plan and execute a project intellectually. If a project is to grow and prosper, it needs to be rooted in the spirit, in the body, in the community, as well as in the mind. And in her final months of life, Spotted Fawn bore her adversity with dignity and good humor. She was neither a whiner nor a complainer.

Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend "a course of reading." Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for books read all of them. There is no other course.

A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, a mere heart of stone. —Charles Darwin

Poetry is at the centre of my life, too, emotionally speaking, and intellectually speaking - it's just that I'm one of those people who enjoy doing other stuff as well.

Here the owner's intellect was stimulated not only by being surrounded by books, but other objects, including busts, vases, coins and a great variety of curiosities, especially antiquities

gargantuan memory for facts

If you think you'll find intellectual stimulation, you're thinking of another era. The conversations are invariably about money or property or schools. I've never been more bored by casual chat.

It is well known that nothing is such thirsty work as the acquisition of knowledge

There is nothing worse than chauvinism underpinned by scholarship.

I like masculine aesthetics. But I also write, make art, have written poetry, and like feminine aesthetics as well. I am probably seen as too masculine by some and as too feminine by others, depending on how stereotypical they are. But I regard myself as a man in the classical mold — someone who develops the intellect, the physical body, and the spirit; creativity, courage, and compassion . . .

he had examined the world by the light of the intellect alone and had seen a totally different construction from that which the senses see by the light of reason.

Our sages commanded that one should not teach one's daughter Torah because the minds of most women are incapable of concentrating on learning, and thus, because of their intellectual poverty, they turn the words of Torah into words of nonsense. Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, "Laws of Torah Study," 1:13

I am what is known as an omnivorous reader and it all goes right through me and out of my mouth.

He'd been obsessed with dying when he was a small boy. He'd banged his head against the pillow in an attempt to drive away the thoughts. How was it possible not to exist? How could he not exist? As a teenager, the preoccupation was still there, but he'd hidden it more skilfully, turning the obsession into an intellectual pose, a cloak to hide his real terror.

Whatever we believe about how we got to be the extraordinary creatures we are today is far less important than bringing our intellect to bear on how do we get together now around the world and get out of the mess that we've made. That's the key thing now. Never mind how we got to be who we are.

From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind.