60 Quotes About Intellect

How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do. Arthur Schopenhauer

Ideas are the source of all things Plato

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

Failure to find the truth is perhaps an intellectual defeat, but failure to look for the truth is an intellectual surrender. Unknown

All the activities that are happening in this world are indeed done through the intellect; there is no need for Knowledge there. Knowledge is indeed in Knowledge (Knowing). And whatever actions are done through the intellect, the Knowledge ‘Knows’ it too. Dada Bhagwan

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry, -- determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine. Henry David Thoreau

To have contrary [negative, wrong] intellect has become an odd rule in this current era, hasn’t it? The one who proceeds with caution will win. Dada Bhagwan

The [true] intellectual is he who does not let harm done to others and nor let any harm done to even one's own self. Dada Bhagwan

Muscle is good, but craft is better Wace

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

Man's mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild. James Allen

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. Mark Helprin

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

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. Friedrich Nietzsche

There is nothing more real than what cannot be seen and there is nothing more certain than what cannot be heard. Confucius

There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses. Oscar Wilde

In each of the early surahs, God spoke intimately to the individual, often preferring to pose many of his teachings in the form of a question - 'Have you not heard?' 'Do you consider?' 'Have you not seen?'. Each listener was thus invited to interrogate him or herself. Any response to these queries was usually grammatically ambiguous or indefinite, leaving the audience with an image on which to meditate but with no decisive answer. This new religion was not about achieving metaphysical certainty; the Quran wanted people to develop a different kind of awarness. . Karen Armstrong

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

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

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

What, " "how, " "when, " etc are all questions more or less common to religion and philosophy. But to ask "why" is a transgression in religion, and this inquiry has undoubtedly taken the heaviest tolls on intellect. Raheel Farooq

Wit had conquered science by laughing it out of court. Philip Schuyler Allen

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

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. -A. A. Milne

I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find W.b. Yeats

The pride in intellect, or rather in the supremacy of the mind, is not restricted to those engaged in intellectual pursuits but is a regular occurrence in all neurosis. Karen Horney

The Islamic intellectual tradition has usually not seen a dichotomy between intellect and intuition but has created a hierarchy of knowledge and methods of attaining knowledge according to which degrees of both intellection and intuition become harmonized in an order encompassing all the means available to man to know, from sensual knowledge an reason to intellection and inner version or the "knowledge of the heart. Seyyed Hossein Nasr

The intellect seeks to throw its own interpretation of the real over reality, and in so doing carves the world up into artificial little cubes. James Rozoff

I couldn't stand being identified by my sexuality, I retaliated by insisting that people regard me for my intellectual worth. My intellect became a form of damage control. Leora Tanenbaum

Wonder, as a quality of intellect, has fallen from favor. Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Intellect is limited, but it has one great merit; it can recognise its limits! Raheel Farooq

Your intuition and your intellect should be working together… making love. That’s how it works best. Madeleine LEngle

The Sufi way is through knowledge and practice, not through intellect and talk. Idries Shah

Unless we recognize a higher power to whom we are responsible and who observes and knows our actions, we will not transcend the selfishness of our character and the subjectivity of our intellect. If each person is the final arbiter of right and wrong, then ‘right’ for him or her will be what he or she desires, regardless of its consequences for the other inhabitants of Earth. Daniel Friedmann

A superior brain without the saving essence of godliness may turn against the human race and drench the world in blood, or worse, it may loose ideas into the earth which will continue to curse mankind for centuries after it has turned to dust again. A.W. Tozer

Do not let your intellect steer you away from what your eyes have seen. Neither should you let it deny what your higher powers have perceived. Ashavan

Here's a good rule of thumb Too clever is dumb. Ogden Nash

We should take care not to make the intellect our god it has of course powerful muscles but no personality. Albert Einstein

The job of intellectuals is to come up with ideas and all we've been producing is footnotes. Theodore H. White

Lord Birkenhead is very clever but sometimes his brains go to his head. All zeal runs down. What replaces it? Intellectualism. Unknown

Will and intellect are one and the same thing. Spinoza

The highest intellects like the tops of mountains are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn. Thomas Babington Macaulay

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. Albert Camus

I hate intellectuals. They are from the top down. I am from the bottom up. Frank Lloyd Wright

Think sideways! Edward De Bono

A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking. Arthur Bloch

The brain is the citadel of sense perception. Pliny The Elder

My body has certainly wandered a good deal but I have an uneasy suspicion that my mind has not wandered enough. Noel Coward

There are innumerable instances suggesting that modern intellectuals do not believe themselves that they don't really believe what they say that they say certain things only in order to assure themselves that they possess opinions and ideas that are different from those that are entertained by the common herd of men. John Lukacs

The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life or of the work. William Butler Yeats

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows. Dwight D. Eisenhower

The common sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses. Leonardo Da Vinci

My intellect was my greatest vanity. Dan Simmons