Quotes About Intellect

Emotions are the curse of logic.

Humans are born with a susceptibility to that most persistent and debilitating disease of intellect: self-deception. The best of all possible worlds and the worst get their dramatic coloration from it. As nearly as we can determine, there is no natural immunity. Constant alertness is required.

The assumption that humans exist within an essentially impermanent universe, taken as an operational precept, demands that the intellect become a totally aware balancing instrument.

I knew Frank Herbert for more than thirty-eight years. He was a magnificent human being, a man of great honor and distinction, and the most interesting person at any gathering, drawing listeners around him like a magnet. To say he was an intellectual giant would be an understatement, since he seemed to contain all of the knowledge of the universe in his marvelous mind. He was my father, and I loved him deeply.

Many things we do naturally become difficult only when we try to make them intellectual subjects. It is possible to know so much about a subject that you become totally ignorant.

Mentat, solve thyself, he thought.

Gravity doesn't just fight expansion," she pleaded. "Gravity defeats chaos, from time to time. It assembles worlds and life and thought. Gravity is the watchmaker, and it feels like it has will, purpose. It's the shape-memory of the universe, trying to pull itself back into a perfect singularity. It's futile, ultimately, but every now and then it creates a perfect node. An intellect. A true wonder.

The soul has two faculties and they should be clearly distinguished. There is the will: its work is to love—and so to choose, to decide, to act. There is the intellect: its work is TO KNOW, TO UNDERSTAND, TO SEE: to see what—TO SEE WHAT'S THERE.

It was very learned, but it didn't actually say anything.

They don't make people like Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley anymore.

The forthputting of willpower is a means of strengthening willpower. The will becomes strong by exercise. To stick to a thing till you are master is a test of intellectual discipline and power.

I read my first book on Woodrow Wilson at age 15, and I was hooked.

Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!

I went to college and graduate school, studying philosophy. I really did think I was going to wind up being a lecturer or professor of some sort.

It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale.

Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can.

I get a fizzy thing in my brain, like a nice glass of wine, and I want to know facts and I want to understand.

The winners of Nobel Prizes must be assumed to possess at least a modicum of imagination and sensibility, and it is therefore incredible that any of us should not experience at this time a veritable surge of emotion.

I appreciate and enjoy mathematics and science and all that side of things. I definitely have that side of me even though I'm not by any means an expert, but I love reading about physics and math and that kind of stuff. I wish I knew more than I did. I mean, I read books written for laymen, not textbooks or anything.

Manufacturing is finite, but human intellect is infinite. Textile is all about manufacturing, and industries like pharmaceuticals are all about human intellect.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

I have always had eclectic obsessions: astrophysics, music theory, the Mongol empire and its history, and the history of the Silk Road, to name a few.

The senses are of the earth, the reason stands apart from them in contemplation.