Quotes About Intellect

Even those to whom Providence has allotted greater strength of understanding can expect only to improve a single science.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

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

Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.

We were always loyal to lost causes...Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. ~ Professor MacHugh

I'm always trying to tackle subjects that tax me and make me think. That's the key to staying young at heart. The brain has to be exercised the same as the rest of the body.

True success depends more on character than on intellect.

One of the most important lessons that experience teaches is that, on the whole, success depends more upon character than upon either intellect or fortune.

She crammed so much knowledge into her head to alleviate the weight in her heart

I could recite you the whole of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Titus Livius, Tacitus, Strada, Jornandes, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Machiavelli, and Bossuet. I name only the most important." "You

Possibly nothing at all; the overflow of my brain would probably, in a state of freedom, have evaporated in a thousand follies; misfortune is needed to bring to light the treasures of the human intellect. Compression is needed to explode gunpowder.

I found that with one hundred and fifty well- chosen books, a man possesses a complete summary of all human knowledge, or at least all that a man need really know.

Possibly nothing at all; the overflow of my brain would probably, in a state of freedom, have evaporated in a thousand follies; misfortune is needed to bring to light the treasures of the human intellect.

Be philosophers, like me, gentlemen: come around the table and let us drink.

I found out that with one hundred and fifty well-chosen books a man possesses, if not a complete summary of all human knowledge, at least all that a man need really know.

I could recite you the whole of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Titus Livius, Tacitus, Strada, Jornandes, Dante, Montaigne, Shaksepeare, Spinoza, Machiavelli, and Bossuet. I name only the most important.

there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the other.

Men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect and a sort of violent distortion of their true nature; they are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments. Unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind.

To read is to ……….indulge yourself in mental masturbation.

She likes to read, she reads all the time, and she prefers to be reading several things at once, she says it gives endless perspective and dimension.

It was believed that all creation came from thought, language, and mathematics.

For some people, 'erudition' is nothing more than a vehicle for hostility and arrogance; 'good taste' merely an excuse for condescension--or worse, censorship -- Sadie

And woe betide the person with the 'double abnormality' of a false self and 'a fine intellect' that they find they can use to escape their pain. 'The world may observe academic success of a high degree, and may find it hard to believe in the very real distress of the individual concerned, who feels 'phoney' the more he or she is successful. [as quoted by Winnicott]

Canada, he told me one day through squinted eyes and smoke rings, is full of violent cowards. People believe they are gentile, but they attack in quiet ways. They use their intellect, their knowledge, always trying to prove they are smarter, more important. The man with no ego is the gentle man, Canada is a land of civilized barbarians.