Intellect Quotes

My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failures.

~ Oscar Wilde

It is not in the gene of an Intellectually blinded person to experience the paradise in the writer's imagination.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Hanging around people you’re smarter than is good for your ego. Hanging around people who are smarter than you is good for your intellect.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

...When a man first awakens, it sometimes takes several moments before he starts thinking clearly.And here I thought it took several years, perhaps a lifetime for the average man's intellect to kick in.

~ Karen Marie Moning

Ladies and gentlemen, when you paint your lips, eyes, nails, hair, side-beards, or whatever, to look beautiful or handsome, don't forget your up stairs, if you don't go up there to put things in order, then, consider the former attributes null and void.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

No, there's going to be no even tenor with me. The more uneven it is the happier I shall be. And when my time comes to die, I'll be able to die happy, for I will have done and seen and heard and experienced all the joy, pain, thrills — every emotion that any human ever had — and I'll be especially happy if I am spared a stupid, common death in bed.” ― Richard Halliburton

~ Richard Halliburton

One not only wants to be understood when one writes, but also quite as certainly not to be understood. It is by no means an objection to a book when someone finds it unintelligible: perhaps this might just have been the intention of its author, perhaps he did not want to be understood by anyone”. A distinguished intellect and taste, when it wants to communicate its thoughts, always selects its hearers; by selecting them, it at the same time closes its barriers against the others. It is there that all the more refined laws of style have their origin: they at the same time keep off, they create distance, they prevent access (intelligibility, as we have said,) while they open the ears of those who are acoustically related to them.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Whenever we think, we construct a world that is centred upon the object of our thinking; whenever we act, we reconstruct a world that is centred upon ourselves.

~ Raheel Farooq

As a people we practiced excess. Excess in everything - pleasure, gaudy display, endless toil, and death. Vagrant children slept in the alleys. Ragpicking was a profession. A conspicuously self-satisfied class of new wealth and weak intellect was all aglitter in a setting of mass misery.

~ E.l. Doctrow

I understand you well. Now we have no need to dispute: you are awake, and so you have seen the difference between us, the difference between men akin to their father and those who take their destiny from a woman; the difference between spirit and intellect.

~ Hermann Hesse

some of the happiest moments of my life have occurred just before I fall asleep or wake up, when I linger in that twilight world between consciousness and unconsciousness, in a state of somnolent repose but also savoring the vital goodness of remaining this close to the vegetative in myself

~ Irving Singer

Perhaps I occasionally sought to give, or inadvertently gave, to the student a sense of battle on the intellectual battlefield. If all you do is to give them a faultless and complete and uninhabited architectural masterpiece, then you do not help them to become builders of their own.

~ Carl-Gustaf Rossby

The intellect is a boat which can take us to the very shores of understanding, but once there we must leave it behind in order to grasp true meaning.

~ Ashavan

Evolution did not design us to believe only true facts, nor to buy only useful products, nor to say only meaningful sentences

~ Piero Scaruffi

I read a page of Plato's great work. I can no longer understand anything, because behind the words on the page, which have their own heavenly brightness, to be sure, there shines an even brighter, an enormous, dazzling -why- that blots out everything, cancels out, destroys all meaning. All individual intelligence. When one has understood, one stops, satisfied with what one has understood. I do not understand. Understanding is far too little. To have understood is to be fixed, immobilized. It is as though one wanted to stop on one step in the middle of a staircase, or with one foot in the void and the other on the endless stair. But a mere why, a new why can set one off again, can unpetrify what was petrified and everything starts flowing afresh. How can one understand? One cannot.

~ Eugène Ionesco

Life entertains humble men by giving men with below average looks (intellect, knowledge, etc.) an above average self-esteem.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Life ups the self-esteem of a low-paid man by giving him things that the high-paid man that he envies cannot buy (intellect, looks, sex appeal, etc.).

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man like Paddy, with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such nonsense to pretend that those who have 'come down in the world' are to be pitied above all others.The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start,and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.

~ George Orwell

Upon the one thing every writer absolutely must have, and that is intellectual curiosity.

~ Philip Athans

Genius is a sovereign power; it forms schools; it lays hold on the spirits of men, with irresistible might; and it exercises an immeasurable influence on the whole condition of human life. This sovereignty of genius is a gift of God, possessed only by his grace. It is subject to no one and is responsible to him alone who has granted it this ascendancy.

~ Abraham Kuyper

For the Word of God is not received by faith if it flits about in the top of the brain, but when it takes root in the depth of the heart . . . the heart's distrust is greater than the mind's blindness. It is harder for the heart to be furnished with assurance [of God's love] than for the mind to be endowed with thought.

~ John Calvin

What we know that we know forms our intellect, what we know that we do not know makes our faith, what we do not know that we know constitutes our emotions, and what we do not know that we do not know is our fate.

~ Raheel Farooq

Growth of consciousness does not depend on the might of the intellect but on the conviction of the heart.

~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

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

If one just intellectually understands the view it will not help! One must actually experience it! There are many people who understand the view but don’t experience it. If the view were experienced, they wouldn’t act the way they do!

~ Padampa Sangye

Science contributes to our culture in many ways, as a creative intellectual activity in its own right, as the light which has served to illuminate man's place in the universe, and as the source of understanding of man's own nature.

~ John F. Kennedy

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

Wit had conquered science by laughing it out of court.

~ Philip Schuyler Allen

It is better to have a fair intellect that is well used, than a powerful one that is idle.

~ Bryant Mcgill

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 powerful intellect leashed by an impoverished vocabulary is a myth. Without a vocabulary, a language, the intellect cannot develop.

~ T. Geronimo Johnson

The principle of vis inertiae (...) seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in their movements than those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily moved, and more embarrassed, and full of hesitation in the first few steps of their progress

~ Edgar Allan Poe

One of the biggest problems with people who think that they are smart is that they believe that the number of times they admit that they are wrong is inversely proportional to theirintellectual level.

~ Daniel Willey

Scholars note that human reasoning is limited not only by imperfect information and innate intellectual capacities but also by the broader culture that subsequently shapes the very optics that individuals use to categorize the world.

~ Michael Barnett

If a negative viewer looks at you with an ugly fiendish eye, find a way and pluck off his eyes, or better still, protect your good image.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

In every man there are two minds that work side by side, the one checking the other; thus emotion stands against reason, intellect corrects passion and first impressions act a little, but very little, before quick reflection.

~ Ford Madox Ford

But you can't be too careful of these strange new ideas and new things. You must not tamper with them. If you try to understand them, they may entangle and get hold of you, and then where will you be? Hide your mind from them, and hide them from your mind. Stick to the plain common sense of life. There will always be a tomorrow rather like today. At least so far there always has been a fairly similar tomorrow. Once or twice lately there have been jolts... Try not to notice these jolts. 'It is no good meeting trouble halfway.

~ H.g. Wells

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

~ #Name?

Human as an intellectual being needs answers about the existence for the purpose of knowing the way to live.

~ Zaman Ali

It is a courage which can find the solution to every problem, not the intelligence.

~ Amit Kalantri