Quotation Explorer - 'Intellectual'

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual -- when it begins to ignore the passions, the motions -- it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance. - Isaac Bashevis Singer
To wisdom belongs the intellectual apprehension of things eternal; to knowledge, the rational apprehension of things temporal. - Saint Augustine
PASTIME, n. A device for promoting dejection. Gentle exercise for intellectual debility. - Ambrose Bierce
An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger. - Dan Rather
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. - Susan Sontag
If most people around a person make, more often than not, her/his life miserable for her/his thoughts being regularly factual, then only s/he is most likely to be an actual intellectual. - Anuj Somany
Traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. - John Brockman
The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be ''American'' before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries? - Edith Wharton
But the culture-vultures and the intellectual snobs, and the self-appointed guardians of the Muses, often frighten off the average person from the free development of this appetite. - Sydney J. Harris
I won't do this movie because I don't believe the love story," she told Selznick. "The heroine is an intellectual woman, and an intellectual woman simply can't fall in love so deeply. - Ingrid Bergman
Intellectual capacity is a precondition for becoming a man of knowledge. - Eraldo Banovac
Intellectual modesty is humility as to what I know; intellectual humility is modesty as to what I do not know - Tariq Ramadan
We create intellectual property on a daily basis, but all of it is not worthy of attention - Dr. Kalyan C. Kankanala
The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward. - John Maynard Keynes
The habit of intellectual principles without reasons is called faith. - Friedrich Nietzsche
Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives."[Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit and bright, Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010] - Anna Quindlen
Learning is retarded in conditions of high anxiety and low acceptance. For most tasks, people have the intellectual knowledge to perform well; they just have a hard time acting on what they know. - Tim Gallwey
In my view, ideas and other intellectual productions are more interesting, more indicative of intelligence, and more productively debated than IQ alone. - Christopher Langan
As everyone knows, it is a thousand times easier to reconstruct the facts of what happened at a certain time than its intellectual atmosphere. The atmosphere is reflected not in official events but, most conspicuously, in small, personal episodes... - Zweig, Stefan
If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a newborn child, then that will be at least a small intellectual advance. In time, perhaps, we may even learn to toddle. - Salman Rushdie
It's amazing to me that we humans have the intellectual capacity to ask deep questions and to devise methods for learning how the universe works and how its contents evolve with time. - Alex Filippenko
Courage is always greatest when blended with meekness; intellectual ability is most admired when it sparkles in the setting of modest self-distrust; and never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge and dares to forgive any injury.
No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors… This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory. - Erwin Schrödinger
Deep to me connotes intellectual rigor, not fashionable obscurity or the unnecessarily academic. - Alex Payne
I just thought: Oh goodness, you can wear nice clothes and get your hair done and still be a feminist and a serious intellectual. - Jacqueline Rose
Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose- a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
Let their faculties have room to unfold, and their virtues to gain strength, and then determine where the whole sex must stand in the intellectual scale. - Mary Wollstonecraft
Engineering is not only study of 45 subjects but it is moral studies of intellectual life. - Prakhar Srivastav
The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence. - Ayn Rand
Mad, adj: Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence. - Ambrose Bierce
Religion is a natural phenomenon of the human mind, but today, in the hands of theoretical bloodsucking religious preachers it has become a lifeless mockery. Now is the time that you take back religion from those intellectual idiots and place it where it belongs, in the temple of your inner cosmos. - Abhijit Naskar
Doubt is your intellectual conscience pleading with you to be honest with yourself. - Peter Boghossian
Because God is a rational being and the universe is his personal creation, it necessarily has a rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting increased human comprehension. This is the key to many intellectual undertakings, among them, the rise of science. - Rodney Stark
Ultimately, intellectual work of this sort is its own reward, because it is focused on the only One whose recognition is important, the One before whom all hearts are open. - Mark A. Noll
Intellectual despair is a subject for comedy. - Marty Rubin
The most crucial problem with intellectual learning is that it receives the unknown on the grounds of the known. - Raheel Farooq
Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity? - Ronald Reagan
Reading . . . is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual. - Jorge Luis Borges
Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today. - André Breton
We must also teach science not as the bare body of fact, but more as human endeavor in its historic context—in the context of the effects of scientific thought on every kind of thought. We must teach it as an intellectual pursuit rather than as a body of tricks. - Isidor Isaac Rabi
Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players. Cultivated labor drives out brute labor. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
During [these] periods of relaxation after concentrated intellectual activity, the intuitive mind seems to take over and can produce the sudden clarifying insights which give so much joy and delight. - Fritjof Capra
It places value on experience versus intellectual understanding. I saw a lot of people contemplating things but it didn't seem to lead to too many places. I got very interested in people who had discovered something more significant than an intellectual, abstract understanding. - Steve Jobs
Death people who are still alive at this hour, must resurrect and ascend to the intellectual heaven where there is no ignorance. - Michael Bassey Johnson
The next presumption is always valid: one's knowledge corresponds toone's intellectual capacity. - Eraldo Banovac
My culture is my identity and personality. It gives me spiritual, intellectual and Emotional distinction from others, and I am proud of it. - M.F. Moonzajer
Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart. - Erica Jong
I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar. It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid. - Dorothy L. Sayers
In the most secret heart of every intellectual ... there lies hidden ... the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man. - Lionel Trilling
Music, verily, is the mediator between intellectual and sensuous life... the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend. - Ludwig van Beethoven
A professional headshot in front of a bookshelf says you're an intellectual. A professional headshot peeking though a bookshelf says you're probably under a restraining order. - Ryan Lilly
Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. - John Maynard Keynes
I do not believe that the present flowering of science is due in the least to a real appreciation of the beauty and intellectual discipline of the subject. It is due simply to the fact that power, wealth and prestige can only be obtained by the correct application of science. - Derek Barton
Nearly all people stand in great horror of annihilation, and yet to give up your individuality is to annihilate yourself. Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul. - Robert G. Ingersoll
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
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. - Samuel Johnson
The truth is: Everyone will judge you. But this depends upon your intellectual capacity whether you are able to distinguish constructive criticism between an insult coming from other people's opinions about you. - Anonymous
TV takes away our freedom to have whatever thoughts we want. So do photographs, movies, and the Internet. They provide us with more intellectual stimuli, but they construct a lower, harder ceiling. - Chuck Klosterman
I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist. - William Golding
Sexual thrills are not all physical, and although Parlabane was an unlikely seducer, even on the intellectual plane, it was clear that his desire was, by this prolonged tickling, to bring me to an orgasm of the mind. - Robertson Davies
Learning continuously is the best way to build one's intellectual capacity. - Eraldo Banovac
To treat fiction as if it were a religious or moral sermon is about as far from the actuality of literature as it is possible to get and indeed it is, in my opinion, the purest form of intellectual barbarism. - Edward W. Said
Is there anything more enlightened, more intelligent, more intellectual than laughter? - Marty Rubin
Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force. - Rudolf Rocker
Reading is the royal road to intellectual eminence...Truly good books are more than mines to those who can understand them. They are the breathings of the great souls of past times. Genius is not embalmed in them, but lives in them perpetually. - William Ellery Channing
It is a sign of intellectual maturity to always crawl to conclusions. - Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind. - Joseph Conrad
Just to say 'I believe' or 'I do not doubt' does not mean that you understand and see. To force oneself to see and accept a thing without understanding is political and not spiritual or intellectual. - Gautama Buddha
The more the world commits to programs for poverty and education, the greater the gap for those with intellectual disabilities. That’s because money goes where results are quick and quantifiable, which is not likely for people with intellectual disabilities. - LAWRENCE DOWNES
To force oneself to believe and to accept a thing without understanding is political, and not spiritual or intellectual. - Gautama Buddha
All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called "Facts". They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. - Thomas Hobbes
The major barrier to skill acquisition is not intellectual, it is emotional. - ted talk
By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu. - Steven Pinker
You're like candy. People lick your knowledge to become wise, lick your words from your powerful mouth and say it even better than you. Lick each step you make and stay on a good track, and once you're dead, the lickers scavenge for another intellectual candy. - Michael Bassey Johnson
In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise. - Sam Harris
To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes. - Jane Jacobs
Jargon allows us to camouflage intellectual poverty with verbal extravagance.
Possibly, there was something to be said for the intellectual discipline of second-guessing what you thought was true. - Kwame Anthony Appiah
The Gnostic’s passionate adoration of Sophia was known as philosophia the love of Sophia a mystical communication with divine feminine wisdom, having little to do with the strictly intellectual, most often masculine, pursuit currently labeled philosophy. - Zeena Schreck
Men have such a good opinion of themselves, of their mental superiority and intellectual depth; they believe themselves so skilled in discerning the true from the false, the path of safety from those of error, that they should be forbidden as much as possible the perusal of philosophic writings. - أبو حامد الغزالي
Learning without thought is labor lost. Thought without learning is intellectual death. - Confucius
I could never think well of a man's intellectual or moral character, if he was habitually unfaithful to his appointments. - Nathaniel Emmons
Emotion lay at the very heart of the process of perception, intertwined with intellectual functions, yet adding to perception a quality that reason lacked. - John Corrigan
The general intellectual level of South Florida is somewhere just above "functionally retarded". - Tucker Max
Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play. - Immanuel Kant
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot. - Mark Twain
Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose -- a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye. - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
'I think therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
It is a convenient truth: You go into the humanities to pursue your intellectual passion; and it just so happens, as a by-product, that you emerge as a desired commodity for industry. - Damon Horowitz
All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power. - Clive James
There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy. - Theodore Dalrymple
Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death. - Albert Einstein
My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. All I am I owe to my mother. I attribute my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her. - George Washington
The point, as I emphasize in the book, is not for players to become professionals, but rather to have innovative and creative ways of thinking about real problems as part of their intellectual toolkit. - David Williamson Shaffer
His conception of the universe is, however, instinctive, not intellectual; it can't be criticized as a concept, because there’s none there, and it can't be criticized as temperament, because temperament can't be criticized. - Álvaro de Campos
However much you study, you cannot know without action. A donkey laden with books is neither an intellectual nor a wise man. Empty of essence, what learning has he whether upon him is firewood or book? - Saadi سعدی
The fragility of the intellectual is the same as the poet's:It's all about the I and its desperate sense of the we. - Prageeta Sharma
In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways. - Edith Wharton
I milked my typical persona as a gritty, intellectual sex-positive feminist that men loved to conquer, toss aside, and shove into their conquest collection in the dusty backs of their closets. - Maggie Young
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
Discussions should always be held just before going to bed, your rear protected by sleep. How painful, after an intellectual conversation, to have to go about with your mind so stirred up. - Thomas Mann
Ulysses was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it. - Orson Scott Card
Failure to find the truth is perhaps an intellectual defeat, but failure to look for the truth is an intellectual surrender. - Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Intellectual growth is when you surpass the barrier of puerility, puzzling people with your dazzling creativity. - Michael Bassey Johnson
One has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience. - Alice James
This little boy playing next to me is an intellectual mass of cells - better yet, he's a clockwork of subatomic movements, a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in minature. [58, Zenith trans.] - Fernando Pessoa
Mental ghettos are not mirages; they actually exist in palpable reality: being "open" inside one's mental or intellectual ghetto does not open its door but simply allows one to harbour the illusion that there is no ghetto and no door. The most dangerous prisons are those with invisible bars. - Tariq Ramadan
The experience of history exalts and enlarges the horizon of our intellectual view. - Trevor Roper
Cosmopolitanism has offered me an ethical perspective and a conceptual framework with which to read the _signs of our times_ as a theologian and intellectual who has a public responsibility for constantly offering a way to engage in this rapidly changing public world. - Namsoon Kang
The exaltation of human reason and its capabilities, a commitment to rigorous and rational debate, a promotion of intellectual inquiry and scholarly exchange--all sponsored by the Church--provided the framework for the Scientific Revolution. - Thomas E. Woods Jr.
[The public school system is] usually a twelve year sentence of mind control.Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism andcompromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting itinstead into meek subservience to authority. - Walter Karp
Scientific literacy is an intellectual vaccine against the claims of charlatans who would exploit ignorance - Neil deGrasse Tyson
Intellectual talent will give us the upper-hand in the game of life. Fortunately, we all can develop it - Julian Pencilliah
The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward. - John Maynard Keynes
Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye. - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Intellectual passion dries out sensuality. - Leonardo da Vinci
Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good. - Philip Pullman
The intellectual mind judges a book after having read it.A fool’s mind judges a book by its title. - Ellen J. Barrier
Good politicians need not be intellectuals, but they should have intellectual lives. - Gary Gutting
When people come to a conclusion that is contrary to popular opinion, there’s a calm resolution to them, for they are experiencing a short burst of pride. They have just captured an intellectual territory, and they will hold that territory. - Mike Klepper
There's nothing like the discovery of an unknown work by a great thinker to set the intellectual community atwitter and cause academics to dart about like those things one sees when looking at a drop of water under a microscope. - Woody Allen
WIT, n. The salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out. - Ambrose Bierce
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex. - Aldous Huxley
Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization. - G. M. Trevelyan
An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way. - Charles Bukowski
[...] rationalism is a form of intellectual bigotry which, in thinking about reality, tries to take it into account as little as possible. - José Ortega y Gasset
Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations. - Robert McKee
To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace—the most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us. - George MacDonald
An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows. - Dwight D. Eisenhower
What ranks above all else for economic and political reconstruction is a radical change of ideologies. Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem. - Ludwig von Mises
Even the intellectual crowd will have none of me. Physically, I look like one of them. Graying at the temples, I walk with a slight limp and wear thick glasses. - Groucho Marx
Making your mind your best friend is the most intellectual choice that any man can make - Mohit Dhaka
Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself. - Alain de Botton
What we can and should change is ourselves: our impatience, our egoism (including intellectual egoism), our sense of injury, our lack of love and forbearance. I regard every other attempt to change the world, even if it springs from the best intentions, as futile. - Hermann Hesse
The human mind demands intellectual expansion and expression. - Brandon Notch
The goal of intellectual life should be to see and understand what is true, not merely to adhere to a prevailing orthodoxy. - Jeffrey Tucker
Courage is not the absence of fear. Only fools have no fear. Rather, courage is the intellectual mastery of fear by understanding the true risks and opportunities of the situation and keeping those things in balance - Julian Assange
I am, perhaps, too intellectual, too modern, for my own comfort! How lovely it would be to sink into the warm comfort of established religion. - Lisa Tuttle
Smart means having intellectual humility rather than high cognitive ability. - Tara Estacaan
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