Intellectual Quotes - Page 16

• 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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• In any given society the authority of man over man runs in inverse proportion to the intellectual development of that society.

  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  Running, Men, Liberty

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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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• Habit is necessary. It is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.

  Edith Wharton

  Past, Long, Curiosity

  Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.7523, Delphi Classics

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• The common stock of intellectual enjoyment should not be difficult of access because of the economic position of him who would approach it.

  Jane Addams

  Justice, Diversity, Culture

  Jane Addams (1977). “On Education”, p.184, Transaction Publishers

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• I believe it was Gayelord Hauser, the nutritionist, who said, 'You are what you eat,' but if you happen to be an intellectual, you are what you quote.

  Joseph Epstein

  Believe, Said, Ifs

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• Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called 'educated' making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? [...] The best thing that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness—in plain English, the stupidity which is still the average mark of our culture.

  George Eliot

  Witty, Religious, Real

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.6957, Delphi Classics

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• We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years......It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supernational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries.

  David Rockefeller

  New York, Grateful, Past

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• I collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a Catholic, which ruined it for both of us.

  Sylvia Plath

  Son, Men, Names

  Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.28, Hamilton Books

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• If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of others. It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacities for instance, become stunted of destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that men are deprived of their independent judgment, and...give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Religious, Giving Up, Independent

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2011). “Letters Papers from Prison”, p.10, Simon and Schuster

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• To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Mean, Intelligent, Knowing

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• Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life──the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within──can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

  George Eliot

  Grief, Struggle, Fall

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• It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

  Ray Bradbury

  Lying, Writing, Groups

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• Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

  Oscar Wilde

  Ideas, Development, Preoccupation

  "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young" (1894)

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• None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.

  Marcel Proust

  Book, Simple, Personality

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• Just being alive is such a gift, but nobody ever told you to be thankful to existence. On the contrary, everyone was grumpy, complaining. Naturally, if everything surrounding your life from the very beginning goes on pointing out to you that you are not what you should be, goes on giving you great ideals that you have to follow and you have to become, your isness is never praised. What is praised is your future - if you can become someone respectable, powerful, rich, intellectual, in some way famous, not just a nobody.

  Rajneesh

  Spiritual, Powerful, Giving

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• We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.

  Lynne Truss

  Thinking, Degrees, Way

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• I have in this War a burning private grudge — which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  War, Inspiration, Light

  Letter to his son Michael Tolkien on June 09, 1941. "The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien", 1981.

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• Do you like my working persona?" Saiman asked softly. "An aesthetically pleasing combination of intelligence and elegance, wouldn't you say?" Aren't we pleased with ourselves. "Are you Chinese, Japanese, half-white? I can't tell, your features are neither here nor there." "I'm inscrutable, mysterious and intellectual." He forgot conceited. "Did you have any trouble getting that ego through the door?" Saiman didn't even blink. "Not in the least.

  Ilona Andrews

  Conceited, Doors, White

  Ilona Andrews (2010). “Magic Bleeds”, p.106, Penguin

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• All good things require effort. That which is worth having will cost part of your physical being, your intellectual power, and your soul power—‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’ (Matt. 7:7.) But you have to seek, you have to knock. On the other hand, sin thrusts itself upon you. It walks beside you, it tempts you, it entices, it allures. You do not have to put forth effort. … Evil seeks you, and it requires effort and fortitude to combat it. But truth and wisdom are gained only by seeking, by prayer, and by effort.

  David O. McKay

  Prayer, Hands, Evil

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• If intellectual curiosity, professional pride, and ambition are the dominant incentives to research, then assuredly no one has a fairer chance of gratifying them than a mathematician.

  G. H. Hardy

  Ambition, Pride, Science

  G. H. Hardy, C. P. Snow (2012). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.80, Cambridge University Press

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• Most areas of intellectual life have discovered the virtues of speculation, and have embraced them wildly. In academia, speculation is usually dignified as theory.

  Michael Crichton

  Academia, Virtue, Theory

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• Science in England is not a profession: its cultivators are scarcely recognised even as a class. Our language itself contains no single term by which their occupation can be expressed. We borrow a foreign word [Savant] from another country whose high ambition it is to advance science, and whose deeper policy, in accord with more generous feelings, gives to the intellectual labourer reward and honour, in return for services which crown the nation with imperishable renown, and ultimately enrich the human race.

  Charles Babbage

  Country, Ambition, Science

  Charles Babbage (1851). “The Exposition of 1851; or, Views of the industry, the science, and the government of England”, p.189

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• To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Love, Men, Vanity

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