Intellectual Life Quotes

• What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Positive, Thinking, People

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2008). “The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.12, Penguin

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• An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

  Aldous Huxley

  Education, Wisdom, Witty

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• What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

  Thomas Mann

  Eugenics, Ideas, Long

  "The War and the Future". Speech in 1940. "Order of the Day: Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades". Book by Thomas Mann, 1942.

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• Agitation is that part of our intellectual life where vitality results; there ideas are born, breed and bring forth.

  George Edward Woodberry

  Ideas, Intellectual, Vitality

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• What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think. This rule,equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Learning, Greatness, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2017). “Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.144, Broadview Press

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• Curiosity, which may or may not eventuate in something useful, is probably the most outstanding characteristic of modern thinking ... Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity, and the less they are deflected by the consideration of immediacy of application, the more likely they are to contribute not only to human welfare, but to the equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest, which may indeed be said to have become the ruling passion of intellectual life in modern times.

  Abraham Flexner

  Passion, Thinking, Curiosity

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• Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character; it becomes lack of power to act with courage proportionate to danger. All this must lead to the destruction of our intellectual life unless the danger summons up strong personalities able to fill the lukewarm and discouraged with new strength and resolution.

  Albert Einstein

  Strong, Attitude, Character

  Speech made in honor of Thomas Mann, January 1939.

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• It has been observed before that images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's spirit.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Beautiful, Passion, Unity

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1834). “Biographia Literaria: Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions”, p.183, Classic Books Company

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• Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties.

  Richard Hofstadter

  Lying, Intellectual, Quests

  Richard Hofstadter (2012). “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life”, p.30, Vintage

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• There is, therefore, a more perfect intellectual life in the angels. In them the intellect does not proceed to self-knowledge from anything exterior, but knows itself through itself.

  Thomas Aquinas

  Angel, Self, Perfect

  Saint Thomas (Aquinas) (1957). “On the Truth of the Catholic Faith. Summa Contra Gentiles”

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• Good politicians need not be intellectuals, but they should have intellectual lives.

  Gary Gutting

  Should Have, Intellectual, Needs

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• The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Life, Passion, Soul

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• Is there intellectual life in America? At present, the answer is no.

  Camille Paglia

  America, Intellectual, Answers

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Vamps & Tramps: New Essays”, p.97, Vintage

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• No vital Christianity is possible unless at least three aspects of it are developed. These are the inner life of devotion, the outer life of service, and the intellectual life of rationality.

  D. Elton Trueblood

  Christian, Intellectual, Three

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• Capitalist agricultural production prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural labourer.

  Karl Marx

  Men, Intellectual, Fertility

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (2016). “Delphi Collected Works of Karl Marx (Illustrated)”, p.1529, Delphi Classics

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• There's a tradition in British intellectual life of mocking any non-political force that gets involved in politics, especially within the sphere of the arts and the theatre.

  Harold Pinter

  Art, Political, Intellectual

  "Pinter: I won't be silenced". Interview with Matthew Tempest, www.theguardian.com. August 3, 2001.

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• Greed probably figures in my intellectual life as well, as I attempt to absorb a massive amount of information with consequent mental indigestion.

  Etty Hillesum

  Greed, Intellectual, Information

  Etty Hillesum, K. A. D. Smelik, Arnold Pomerans (2002). “Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943”, p.146, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• The goal of intellectual life should be to see and understand what is true, not merely to adhere to a prevailing orthodoxy.

  Jeffrey Tucker

  Goal, Intellectual, Orthodoxy

  FaceBook post by Jeffrey A. Tucker from Sep 10, 2014

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• Literature is a comprehensive essence of the intellectual life of a nation.

  William Shakespeare

  Essence, Intellectual, Literature

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• I think it is time for a new pride in the intellectual life, and a new impatience with people who take pride in ignorance, or somehow use "elite" to mean "person who has taken the time to know" and then are eager to dismiss, say, striving, or the notion that improving one's self out of difficult conditions is a noble thing.

  George Saunders

  Taken, Ignorance, Mean

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste.

  Terence McKenna

  Intellectual, Taste, Ninety

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• Pragmatism , in trying to turn experimental physics into a prototype of all science and to model all spheres of intellectual life after the techniques of the laboratory, is the counterpart of modern industrialism, for which the factory is the prototype of human existence, and which models all branches of culture after production on the conveyor belt.

  Max Horkheimer

  Intellectual, Trying, Culture

  Max Horkheimer (2004). “EPZ Eclipse of Reason”, p.35, A&C Black

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• But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Philosophy, Thinking, Years

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, books.google.ru. March 4, 2010.

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• The Greeks, those originators of the intellectual life, fixed for us the idea of the poet. He was a divine man; more sacred than the priest, who was at best an intermediary between men and the gods, but in the poet the god was present and spoke.

  George Edward Woodberry

  Men, Origin Of Life, Ideas

  George Edward Woodberry (1920). “The Torch, and Other Lectures and Addresses”

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• There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.

  Steven Pinker

  Intellectual, Guilt, Western Culture

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