Quotes About Intellect

For the neurotic, the merging of the subconscious and the conscious may be risky, just as it is for the users of drugs. But for the writer who is aware of the way in which this connection exists in reality and nourishes creativity, the sooner he can achieve a synthesis among intellect, emotion, and instinct, the sooner his work will be integrated.

I don't like superior attitudes based on well-poised intellect. I hate well-poised intellects.

For the neurotic, the merging of the subconscious and the conscious may be risky, just as it is for the users of drugs. But for the writer who is aware of the way in which this connection exists in reality and nourishes creativity, the sooner he can achieve a synthesis among intellect, intuition, emotion, and instinct, the sooner his work will be integrated.

I want to give you an idea. . . . "Ask some rector for a copy of the Apocrypha". . .. "Read Rabelais in old French." "Reread Cervantes" .

Miller is a far more distinguished mind than Céline.

You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood.

Free thought is a passion; it is much rather the thoughts than ourselves that are free.

The beauty of a Jewish education is that you learn how to argue.

We take girls and send them to schools. It is good of us, because girls are not supposed to know anything much, and in many other societies girls are not sent to school or taught to read and write. In our society, such a generous one to women, girls are taught some facts, but not inquiry or the passion of knowing. Girls are taught in order to make them compliant: intellectual adventurousness is drained, punished, ridiculed out of girls.

Books are not luxuries. They are the meat and drink for the mind.

Bertrand Russell

You can never be wise unless you love reading.

Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.

All intellectual improvement arises from leisure.

It is too well known, that the second George never was an Augustus to learning or genius.

Although genius always commands admiration, character most secures respect. The former is more the product of brain-power, the latter of heart-power; and in the long run it is the heart that rules in life. Men of genius stand to society in the relation of its intellect, as men of character of its conscience; and while the former are admired, the latter are followed.

For who will dare to force his way out of the crowd, — not of the mere vulgar, — but of the vain and banded aristocracy of intellect, and presume to join the almost supernatural beings that stand by themselves aloof?

The first man of science was he who looked into a thing, not to learn whether it could furnish him with food, or shelter, or weapons, or tools, or ornaments, or play-withs, but who sought to know it for the gratification of knowing. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A suspicion that lightness is not deeply serious (but instead whimsical) pervades aesthetic discourse. But what if lightness is a philosophical choice to temper reality with strangeness, to temper the intellect with emotion, and to temper emotion with humor.

So things go on as before with those who think a great deal and effect nothing, and those who think nothing evidently doing it all...

It hardly does much good to have a complex mind without actually being a philosopher.

all the ingenuity of mankind, or as M. Yermelov used to say, intellect without soul, was turned loose—the will of the insane to suffer pouring into erotic channels.

what people called culture was nothing but a fancier term for their ignorance.

But can thought wake you from the dream of existence? Not if it becomes a second realm of confusion, another more complicated dream, the dream of intellect, the delusion of total explanations.