Quotes About Intellect

Nowhere among the early Christians do we find the cold light of intellectual understanding that constantly analyzes and differentiates. Instead, there was the Spirit that burned within their hearts and made their souls alive. (Col. 2:8–10)

Sarcasm is a weapon of the intellectual

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth.

The fundamental fact about the Greek was that he had to use his mind. The ancient priests had said, Thus far and no farther. We set the limits of thought. The Greek said, All things are to be examined and called into question. There are no limits set on thought.

All things are at odds when God sets a thinker loose on the planet

How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be American before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?

Ah, good conversation — there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.

He was a small, stringy man of about fifty, with immense horn-rimmed spectacles, a long, sharp nose, and an unusual capacity for garrulous incoherence.

The man who satisfies a ceaseless intellectual curiousity probably squeezes more out of life in the long run than anyone else.

Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people.

When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense

Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.

The more we learn of outer space and inner space, of quasars and quarks, of Big Bangs and Little Blips, the more remote, abstract and intellectually inconsequential it all becomes.

Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.

Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.

The system will always be defended by those countless people who have enough intellect to defend but not quite enough to innovate.

In the century of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, and Newton," one historian wrote, "the most versatile genius of all was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

All that is comes from the mind; it is based on the mind, it is fashioned by the mind.

Cave ab homine unius libri [Beware the man of one book].

La medicina no empezó como un deporte intelectual pensado para ejercitar nuestro ingenio ante un diagnóstico enigmático o un misterio fisiológico, sino que lo hizo como consecuencia de ciertos sentimientos específicos de los pacientes y de los sentimientos que estos despertaban en los primeros médicos;

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

Jamás se ha emborrachado nadie a base de comprender intelectualmente la palabra "vino