Intellect Quotes

To learn to see- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.

It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation.

Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight, and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are better and more desirable than pleasure

Painting is a jeu d'esprit.

A genius is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. He breaks his engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his attention down and back from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his genius constantly occupies his mind.

There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding.

I have been told, that in some public discourses of mine my reverence for the intellect has made me unjustly cold to the personalrelations. But now I almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words. For persons are love's world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to the power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts.

Make the doors upon a woman's wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that, and 'twill out at the key-hole; stop that, 'twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney.

Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature, and has populated it with monstrous machines.

Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar's atmosphere.

I am not a bit afraid of Siegfried Sassoon. That man can think. I am afraid only of people who cannot think.

Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray.

The elimination of the will altogether and the switching off of the emotions all and sundry, is tantamount to the elimination of reason: intellectual castration.

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.

Those who, in debate, appeal to their qualifications, argue from memory, not from understanding.

I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, ininvention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means.

The intellect is always fooled by the heart.

Perfect clarity would profit the intellect but damage the will.

Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever.

Painting fulfills a need to be non-intellectual. There are times when we have to get our brains out in our fingers.

I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever. I'm not really book-smart.

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

Intellect is a magnitude of intensity, not a magnitude of extensity.

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

A man in all the world's new fashion planted, That hath a mint of phrases in his brain.

Always to see the general in the particular is the very foundation of genius.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.

Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.

I've got to tell you, the Internet is a place you go when you want to turn your brain on, and television is a place you go when you want to turn your brain off. I'm not at all convinced that the twain will meet.

One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical…for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.

He was not so much brain as earwax

Every habit makes our hand more witty and our wit less handy.

The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

To the man of thought almost nothing is really ridiculous.

The intelligent desire self-control; children want candy.

To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.

Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

What is the hardest task in the world? To think.

Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function; living is the functionary.

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.

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.

The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.

[T]he more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

Ten percent of people can think, another ten percent of people think that they think, and eighty percent of people would rather die than be made to think.

The judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth.

One is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in it, of no generalized passion for intellectual and spiritual adventure, of no organized determination to think things out. What is there is a highly self-conscious and insipid correctness, a bloodless respectability submergence of matter in manner--in brief, what is there is the feeble, uninspiring quality of German painting and English music.

Do not allow yourselves to be deceived: Great Minds are Skeptical.

Even great spirits have only their five-fingers' breadth of experience - just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.

Nature is good, but intellect is better, as the law-giver is before the law-receiver.

The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. 'I am no such thing,' it would say; 'I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.

An intellectual hatred is the worst.

They have a plentiful lack of wit.

First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.

The intellectual is always showing off,the lover is always getting lost.The intellectual runs away.afraid of drowning;the whole business of loveis to drown in the sea.Intellectuals plan their repose;lovers are ashamed to rest.The lover is always alone.even surrounded by people;like water and oil, he remains apart.The man who goes to the troubleof giving advice to a loverget nothing. He's mocked by passion.Love is like musk. It attracts attention.Love is a tree, and the lovers are its shade.

The society of the energetic class, in their friendly and festive meetings, is full of courage, and of attempts, which intimidatethe pale scholar.

Great spirits often meet violent oppisition with mediocre minds.