Intellectual Quotes - Page 15

• There is evidence for the deity of Jesus -- good, strong, historical , cumulative evidence; evidence to which an honest person can subscribe without committing intellectual suicide.

  John Stott

  Suicide, Jesus, Strong

  John Stott, Rick Warren (2012). “Basic Christianity, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition”, p.14, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• He had thought more than other men, and in matters of the intellect he had that calm objectivity, that certainty of thought and knowledge, such as only really intellectual men have, who have no axe to grind, who never wish to shine, or to talk others down, or to appear always in the right.

  Hermann Hesse

  Men, Objectivity, Shining

  Hermann Hesse (2013). “Steppenwolf: A Novel”, p.8, Macmillan

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• In a world in which there is so much to interest, so much to enjoy, and so much also to correct and improve, everyone who has this moderate amount of moral and intellectual requisites is capable of an existence which may be called enviable; and unless such a person, through bad laws, or subjection to the will of others, is denied the liberty to use the sources of happiness within his reach, he will not fail to find the enviable existence

  John Stuart Mill

  Law, Liberty, Use

  John Stuart Mill (2017). “Utilitarianism”, p.13, Coventry House Publishing

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• At least I was true. My intellectual abilities gave me a release, and an excuse. I shunned company because I preferred books; and the dreams I confided to my father were of becoming a scholar in good earnest, and going to University. It was unheard-of several shocked governesses were only too quick to tell me, when I spoke a little too boldly -- but my father nodded and smiled and said, 'We'll see.' Since I believed my father could do anything -- except of course make me pretty -- I worked and studied with passionate dedication, lived in hope, and avoided society and mirrors.

  Robin McKinley

  Dream, Father, Book

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• Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back

  John Maynard Keynes

  Believe, Men, Air

  The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money bk. 6, ch. 24 (1936)

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• 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

  Loss, Frustration, Losing

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• The generality of mankind is lazy. What distinguishes men of genuine achievement from the rest of us is not so much their intellectual powers and aptitudes as their curiosity, their energy, their fullest use of their potentialities. Nobody really knows how smart or talented he is until he finds the incentives to use himself to the fullest. God has given us more than we know what to do with.

  Sydney J. Harris

  Smart, Men, Lazy

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• We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Adventure, Dark, Issues

  "Hayek on a Society Based on Freedom" by Scott Horton, harpers.org. August 08, 2007.

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• A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy ice cream or aspirin or gin. They even need to buy a pinch of intellectual catnip now and then to liven up their thoughts.

  John Dos Passos

  Ice Cream, People, Needs

  John Dos Passos (1964). “Occasions and protests”

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• This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton's famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.

  Steven Johnson

  Practice, Water, Age

  Steven Johnson (2006). “The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World”, p.146, Penguin

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• I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which 'sexism' is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed 'patrivincialism' or patrochialism': the assumption that women are a subgroup, that men's culture is the 'real' world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the 'great' or 'liberalizing' periods of history have been the same for women as for men.

  Adrienne Rich

  Real, Men, Males

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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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• What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturabtion … whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Art, Emotional, Self

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• The general intellectual level of South Florida is somewhere just above "functionally retarded".

  Tucker Max

  Florida, Levels, Retarded

  Tucker Max (2012). “Hilarity Ensues”, p.289, Simon and Schuster

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• Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!

  Susan Sontag

  Pain, Giving, Perfect

  Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.8, Macmillan

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• Human beings are very unbalanced and prone to go off on tangents. In every area of life- with too great emphasis on one thing, leaving out another important thing altogether. None of us will ever be perfectly balanced in our spiritual lives, our intellectual lives, our emotional lives, our family lives, in relationships with other human beings, or in our business lives. BUT WE ARE CHALLENGED TO TRY, WITH THE HELP OF GOD. We are meant to live in the scriptures.

  Edith Schaeffer

  Spiritual, Emotional, Leaving

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• 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

  Men, Thinking, Light

  Arthur Schopenhauer (1910). “The Art of Literature: a Series of Essays in Arthur Schopenhauer...”

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• There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that - perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims.

  Oscar Wilde

  Real, Passion, Exercise

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.36, GENERAL PRESS

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• He (Intellectuals) claims that label to compensate for his own inadequacies. It's as old as that saying: tell me what you boast of and I'll tell you what you lack. Our daily bread. The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as excessively devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant and the feeble-minded as intellectual.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Humble, Experts, Labels

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• My philosophy is fundamentally sad, but I’m not a sad man, and I don’t believe I sadden anyone else. In other words, the fact that I don’t put my philosophy into practice saves me from its evil spell, or, rather, my faith in the human race is stronger then my intellectual analysis of it; there lies the fountain of youth in which my heart is continually bathing.

  Antonio Machado

  Philosophy, Lying, Believe

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• Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.

  John Kennedy Toole

  Roots, Odor, Rotting

  John Kennedy Toole (2004). “A Confederacy of Dunces”, p.70, LSU Press

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• Loud, stupid and overeating will suffice as long as we also have the funny, the fierce and the intellectual

  Denis Leary

  Stupid, Long, Fierce

  Denis Leary (2008). “Why We Suck: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid”, p.59, Penguin

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• My intellectual achievement was retarded when I went to high school. I sort of sank into a black hole because I had to go to the high-achieving, academic public high school.

  Noam Chomsky

  School, Achievement, Black

  David Barsamian, Noam Chomsky (2001). “Propaganda and the Public Mind: Conversations with Noam Chomsky”, p.19, Pluto Press

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• I have problems with a religion which says that faith in itself is enough for a ticket to heaven. In other words, that the ideal is your ability to manipulate your own common sense to accept something your intellect rejects. It's the same model of intellectual submission that dictatorships have used throughout time, the concept of a higher reasoning without any obligation to discharge the burden of proof.

  Jo Nesbo

  Burden Of Proof, Common Sense, Heaven

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• For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the 'realities' of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Believe, Reality

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