Quotes About Intellect

If one's intellectual equipment was not great, one's spiritual experience not deep, the result of doing one's very best could only seem very lightweight in comparison with the effort involved. But perhaps that was not important. The mysterious power that commanded men appeared to him to ask of them only obedience and the maximum of effort and to remain curiously indifferent as to the results.

His hunger for knowledge gave him no rest, it was both his bane and his joy.

Unbelief was easier than belief, much less demanding and subtly flattering because the agnostic felt himself to be intellectually superior to the believer. And then unbelief haunted by faith, as she knew by experience, produced a rather pleasant nostalgia, while belief haunted by doubt involved real suffering.

Harriet, her only child, was what the villagers in Mrs. Ogilvy's old home would have called a natural. Her intellect was not so clouded that intercourse with ordinary people was out of the question; the deficiency showed itself rather in a horrid uncouthness, the more noticeable in that she had a vigorous and powerful zest for such aspects of existence as were intelligible to her; she was not easy to put out of the way.

One biographer summed up Lyell's influence on Darwin as follows: "Without Lyell there would have been no Darwin." Darwin himself, after publishing his account of the voyage of the Beagle and also a volume on coral reefs, wrote, "I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell's brains.

Lyell became something of a celebrity—the Steven Pinker of his generation—and

Most people don´t like to think, period.

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.

My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.

I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.

Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.

Diogenes's quick wit and, dare we say it, cynical outlook disguised a first-class intellect focused on proving a single principle: that we have to own nothing, absolutely nothing, to be truly free.

He is the founder of Western technology as an intellectual discipline—one might even say as a passion. He was Archimedes of Syracuse.

In 1210, it issued its first condemnation of Averroës and his disciples in the West; for good measure, it extended the ban to the works of Aristotle. It was already too late. Just fifteen years after the ban was issued, Aristotle's greatest medieval expositor was born. To his family and neighbors, he was Tommaso D'Aquino. To history, he is Saint Thomas Aquinas, the single greatest creative mind of the Middle Ages.

Everyone and everything were becoming bricks in the comprehensive and complex edifice Aristotle was determined to build in order to reach the most profound truths. Those truths, as he made clear,† come not in a sudden moment of intuitive insight or from some inner contemplative process. They are the result of hard work and thought.

Zij steunden elkaar in het idee dat vrouwen zichzelf tekort doen door op hun gevoel te vertrouwen en dat ze pas werkelijk vrij zullen zijn wanneer de intuïtie voor eens en altijd door het intellect wordt overwonnen. Hierover rebbelden ze met een passie die hun gelijk ongewild bewees.

He dived deeper and deeper into his books; he had taken all obsolescence to be his province; in his disgust at the stupid usual questions, "Will it pay?" "What good is it?" and so forth, he would only read what was uncouth and useless.

La musique savante manque à notre désir

Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.

Hatred is an affair of the heart contempt that of the head.

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

The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.