Intellect Quotes

“Geniuses and prophets do not usually excel in professional learning, and their originality, if any, is often due precisely to the fact that they do not.”
― Joseph Aloïs Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

“I sought her eye, desirous to read there the intelligence which I could not discern in her face or hear in her conversation; it was merry, rather small; by turns I saw vivacity, vanity, coquetry, look out through its irid, but I watched in vain for a glimpse of soul. I am no Oriental; white necks, carmine lips and cheeks, clusters of bright curls, do not suffice for me without that Promethean spark which will live after the roses and lilies are faded, the burnished hair grown grey. In sunshine, in prosperity, the flowers are very well; but how many wet days are there in life--November seasons of disaster, when a man's hearth and home would be cold indeed, without the clear, cheering gleam of intellect.”
― Charlotte Brontë, The Professor

“As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour perfectly harmonised; it is true to life. On the other hand, the intellectual attainments of the mere man of learning are like a large palette, full of all sorts of colours, which at most are systematically arranged, but devoid of harmony, connection and meaning.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena

“Someone may have all the technical knowledge, scientific intellect and business know-how but when he/she decides to choose laziness, excuses, procrastination, complaining and other bad attitudes, his/her relevance is meaningless.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“Knowing belongs to man's intellect or reason; loving belongs to his will. The object of the intellect is truth; the object of the will is goodness or love.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Life Is Worth Living

“He's one fry short of a Happy Meal.”
― Rush Limbaugh

“The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.”
― John William Draper, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science

“Our intellect is not intended to be an end in itself, but only a means to the very mind of God.”
― Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Other Gods: The Absolute Claims of the Christian Message

“Nothing complements a fast mind better than a slow tongue. And nothing aggravates a slow mind better than a fast tongue.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Humanity is a cage, and our puritanical sensibilities comprise the bars. We are confined by our own reason and intellect, and yet most of us don't even know it.”
― Nenia Campbell, Fearscape

“I shall never be very merry or very sad, for I am more prone to analyse than to feel.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“Is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of te chest beneath that makes them seem so.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

“ليس هناك أيديولوجية لا تقوم الثورة إلا بها بقدر ما أن ليس هناك ثورة تقوم بها طبقة واحدة أيديولوجية ”
― برهان غليون, بيان من اجل الديمقراطية

“As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“دعوة علماء الدين إلى أن يكونوا رسل الديمقراطية الإسلامية بالسعي لتعديل مابين طبقات الناس من الفروق الشاسعة”
― مصطفى صبري, موقف العقل والعلم والعالم من رب العالمين وعباده المرسلين

“Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Genius and the Goddess

“من الناس من يتخذ من المناصب الحكومية طبقات في العلم يوشك من ارتقاها مرة ألا يصعد إلية صوت ناقد”
― مصطفى صبري, موقف العقل والعلم والعالم من رب العالمين وعباده المرسلين

“A cultivated mind—I do not mean that of a philosopher, but any mind to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has been taught, in any tolerable degree, to exercise its faculties—finds sources of inexhaustible interest in all that surrounds it: in the objects of nature, the achievements of art, the imaginations of poetry, the incidents of history, the ways of mankind, past and present, and their prospects in the future.”
― John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

“... the mind was designed not to defend what we want, but to discover what is ultimately true, which should shape our wants and satisfy them more deeply with God. The purpose of the mind is not to rationalize subjective preferences, but to recognize objective reality and to help the heart revel in God.”
― John Piper, The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God's Delight in Being God

“Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.”
― William James, A Pluralistic Universe

“Don't run around looking for someone who can sexually satisfy you, run around and look for the book which will intellectually satisfy you.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“It’s not Love. But what fault is it of mine
if my affections do not become
Love? Very much my fault, I would say,
when I can live from day to day
on mad purity, blind pity…
Make a scandal of meekness.
But the violence of the senses and intellect
that has confounded me for years
was the only way.”
― Pier Paolo Pasolini, Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini, The: A Bilingual Edition

“It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then is he caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Listen, nitwit, what good will it do you to know whether I am "sincere" or "insincere"? What does this have to do with whether or not my thoughts are right? I can utter a soaring truth "insincerely" and say the stupidest thing "sincerely". Learn to judge the thought independently of who says it or how.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Diary

“When enemies, the intellect and the heart only see one another as the hater and the fool.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“There's a difference between intellect and intelligence. Noise propagates the former, silence the later. Intellect is inherited, intelligence is inherent.”
― Drew Gerald

“When we have learnt to call storms, storms, and death, death, and birth, birth, when we have mastered the sailor's horn-book and Mr Piddington's law of cyclones, Ellis's anatomy and Lewer's midwifery, we have already made ourself half blind. We have become hypnotized by words and names. We think in words and names, not in ideas; the commonplace has triumphed, the true intellect is half crushed.”
― Henry de Vere Stacpoole, The Blue Lagoon