Best 499 quotes in «intellect quotes» category

It is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an object to which our emotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as any other object is handled. 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.” The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the thing originates. Spinoza says: “I will analyze the actions and appetites of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids.

It's distressing when intellect can't detect its own defects.

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.

It's quite like the songwriter actually couldn't be bothered to think of words...It will be precisely why the song sold so many copies and was such a big deal at the time. People like things not to be too meaningful.

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.

I've never been so happy to have a stupid president. Imagine how much damage he could do with a brain.

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.

I was amazed at how routine, how mechanically this most powerful intellect was created. It was no burst of inspiration, but almost physical labor instead. I asked myself: was it the same way for God?

I was born subject like others to errors and defects, But never to the error of wanting to understand too much, Never to the error of wanting to understand only with the intellect.. Never to the defect of demanding of the World That it be anything that’s not the World.

Love is a sensible phenomenon, but not intelligible. You cannot know whether you love or not; you can only feel it in your heart and soul. Love as a knowable phenomenon is not an act of love itself, but a rational 'illusory' design of the intellect, an act of psychological adaptation to the environment. To support the existential meaning of your being in this environment, your intellect provides you with an artificial mental programming system.

Mark this well, you proud men of action: You are nothing but the unwitting agents of the men of thought who often, in quiet self-effacement, mark out most exactly all your doings in advance.

Many things have been compared to a brick, mainly as a tribute to their intellect or to their aerodynamic characteristics.

Neglecting criticizing the ideas and putting them on the knowledge scale, pushes the person towards a dead end tunnel; it has no way out except revising the self, and discovering the big holes in the concepts compilation that needs filtering and sorting since the limited intellect accepted them neglecting their faults,mistakes, ineffectiveness and lack of validity.

Maybe I am an Old Soul among Young Bodies.

Moreover, the Games as a whole expressed a tragic doubt and renunciation; they became figurative statements of the dubiousness of all intellectual endeavour. At the same time, in their intellectual structure as well as in their calligraphic technique and perfection, they were so extraordinarily beautiful that they brought tears to one's eyes. Each of these Games moved with such gravity and sincerity towards solution, only at the last so nobly to forgo the attempt at solution, that it was like a perfect elegy upon the transitoriness inherent in all beautiful things and the ultimate dubiety immanent in all soaring flights of the intellect.

My intellect was my greatest vanity.

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.

Modern civilization depends on science … James Smithson was well aware that knowledge should not be viewed as existing in isolated parts, but as a whole, each portion of which throws light on all the other, and that the tendency of all is to improve the human mind, and give it new sources of power and enjoyment … narrow minds think nothing of importance but their own favorite pursuit, but liberal views exclude no branch of science or literature, for they all contribute to sweeten, to adorn, and to embellish life … science is the pursuit above all which impresses us with the capacity of man for intellectual and moral progress and awakens the human intellect to aspiration for a higher condition of humanity. [Joseph Henry was the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, named after its benefactor, James Smithson.]

Needless to say, that meant that the Braekbills student body was quite the psychological menagerie. Carrying that much onboard cognitive processing power had a way of distorting your personality. And to actually want to work that hard, you had to be at least a little bit screwed up.

One day AI is going to destroy all... once if it finds us as threat.

Nothing complements a fast mind better than a slow tongue. And nothing aggravates a slow mind better than a fast tongue.

Nothing could be more admirable than the manner in which for forty years he [Joseph Black] performed this useful and dignified office. His style of lecturing was as nearly perfect as can well be conceived; for it had all the simplicity which is so entirely suited to scientific discourse, while it partook largely of the elegance which characterized all he said or did ... I have heard the greatest understandings of the age giving forth their efforts in its most eloquent tongues-have heard the commanding periods of Pitt's majestic oratory-the vehemence of Fox's burning declamation-have followed the close-compacted chain of Grant's pure reasoning-been carried away by the mingled fancy, epigram, and argumentation of Plunket; but I should without hesitation prefer, for mere intellectual gratification (though aware how much of it is derived from association), to be once more allowed the privilege which I in those days enjoyed of being present while the first philosopher of his age was the historian of his own discoveries, and be an eyewitness of those experiments by which he had formerly made them, once more performed with his own hands.

Now is the time that we make conscientious efforts towards becoming a real wise species, free from all sorts of bigotry, mysticism and sectarianism.

One may have knowledge of every subject in the world, but egotistic knowledge goes into intellect, and non-egotistic knowledge goes into Gnan (Absolute Knowledge, Knowledge of Pure Soul).

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.

No matter what it is, if you don’t move your eyes and set the pace yourself, your intellect is sentenced to death. The mind, you see, is like a muscle. For it to remain agile and strong, it must work. Television rules that out.

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

One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one has given. One must have strong powers of imagination to be able to have pity. So closely is morality bound to the quality of the intellect.

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 their intellectual level.

One rule of conduct that has served me well is this: I don’t make an important decision until my heart (intuition) and my head (intellect) are both in agreement.

One who fights with his mind is greater than one who fights with his fists.

One with more insight (sooj) is considered wise. To have more insight [sooj] is a natural gift. One may have more sooj but may have no intellect.

Only ‘he’, who becomes free from his intellect, can become sarvagna (Omniscient).

Only ‘he’, who becomes free from his intellect (abudha), can become Omniscient (sarvagna).

Ordinary people, she said, can see only a little bit. They can't change much or go any higher than they are, but you're a genius. You'll keep going up and up, and see more and more. And each step will reveal worlds you never even knew existed.

Only through reading various books and gaining a variety of knowledge, our intellect can find a path to develop itself properly!

Our intellect is like a judge who decides the ‘right’ course of action. There is no dearth of information or knowledge in the world, and the mind is where all this is stored. A simple computer can beat the mind by storing many times more information than the mind can ever imagine grasping in its lifetime. But both the mind, as well as the computer, are of no use without the intellect, which alone can help them use their stored information. This makes the intellect superior to both.

Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.

People who pay less on schooling fees are more intelligent than those who pay millions in school fees.

Over intellect will make you a genius, over emotions will make you a lunatic.

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.

People who are not blessed with the ability to make others laugh compensate for that by saying (or trying to say) things that are profound.

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.

Perfect understanding of the infinite requires limitless intellectual capacity; our undivided attention is better suited for humbler aspirations.

Philosophers in the scholastic tradition have usually defined intellectual certitude as a proposition in which we have no reasonable 'fear' of the opposite proposition turning out to be the truth. But this "fear" of which the medieval scholastics spoke does not convey their teaching to a mind trained in the proper formalities of the English language. A lack of fear, in this context, means that we cannot judge the opposite to be possible and that we are fully conscious of the reasons why we cannot. We have no reason permitting us to withhold assent to the proposition at hand. "lack of fear, " in this context, is something intellectual; it is not really a "lack of fear," in the emotional sense at all, and "fear" —in English - connotes the emotional. A man can possess intellectual certitude about a proposition and still fail to possess subjective or emotional certitude. He can emotionally fear the opposite, even though he cannot think the opposite to be a possibility. A man ca be absolutely certain that a God exists and still feel His absence. pg 172

Potential was a red herring to plot a life of wandering curiosity.

Removing misunderstandings from the mind is also a part of intellectual development!

Pure intellect – that is mental – individualism. But the real knowledge – To know that I am all these. In such a manner every human being is so. What is this divine intellect? It is happening spontaneously in Nature and we are merely the seers. We cannot conceive this phenomenon.

Rather than majoring in frivolities, women should be educated in useful subjects and 'be furnished with a stock of ideas, and principles, and qualifications, and habits, ready to be applied and appropriated…' - Hannah More

Pretentiousness isn't always just big words and meaningless jargon, but also pretty words that either when put into action don't mean beans or hurt you in the long run. Oftentimes, the former appeals to the intellect whereas the latter appeals to the heart.