Intellectual Quotes - Page 20

• Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown.

  Alan Watts

  Suicide, Commitment, Mind

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• In New York I'd go to the movies three or four times a week. Here I've upped it to six or seven, mainly because I'm too lazy to do anything else. Fortunately, going to the movies seems to suddenly qualify as an intellectual accomplishment, on a par with reading a book or devoting time to serious thought. It's not that the movies have gotten any more strenuous, it's just that a lot of people are as lazy as I am, and together we've agreed to lower the bar.

  David Sedaris

  New York, Book, Reading

  David Sedaris (2000). “Me talk pretty one day”

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• Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so called pleasure.

  Erich Fromm

  Political, Progress, Despair

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• And why should he interest himself at all in my moral and intellectual capacities: what is it to him what I think and feel?' I asked myself. And my heart throbbed in answer to the question.

  Anne Bronte

  Heart, Thinking, Answers

  Anne Bronte (2012). “Agnes Grey”, p.101, Courier Corporation

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• Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Integrity, Reading, Ethical

  Jonathan Franzen (2007). “How to Be Alone: Essays”, p.82, Macmillan

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• The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.

  Ayn Rand

  Liberty, Argument, Intimidation

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.56, Penguin

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• Any teacher can study books, but books do not necessarily bring wisdom, nor that human insight essential to consummate teaching skills.

  Bliss Perry

  Teacher, Book, Teaching

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• Bear in mind that brains and learning, like muscle and physical skill, are articles of commerce. They are bought and sold. You can hire them by the year or by the hour. The only thing in the world not for sale is character.

  Antonin Scalia

  Teaching, Learning, Character

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• He said that few people had intellectual resources sufficient to forgo the pleasures of wine. They could not otherwise contrive how to fill the interval between dinner and supper.

  Samuel Johnson

  Wine, People, Dinner

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• Fear is what prevents the flowering of the mind.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Teaching, Assessment, Personality

  Jiddu Krishnamurti (2003). “Krishnamurti on Education”, p.40, Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Ltd.

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• Lecturers should remember that the capacity of the mind to absorb is limited to what the seat can endure.

  Evan Esar

  Teaching, Mind, Intelligence

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• Let us by wise and constitutional measures promote intelligence among the people as the best means of preserving our liberties.

  James Monroe

  Wise, Teaching, Mean

  James Monroe (199?). “The Writings of James Monroe: 1817-1823”

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• On those who overanalyze his music: When you tear the wings off a butterfly, it is no longer a butterfly

  Claude Debussy

  Teaching, Butterfly, Assessment

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• The world needs specialists and highly trained people with advanced degrees, no question about it. But the world also needs diversity and versatility. It needs people who know as much about our value system as they do about our solar system.

  Roger Smith

  Teaching, People, Diversity

  U.S. News & World Report Vol 92 (p. 66), 1982.

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• They don't tell you this in school, Everybody plays the fool.

  Smokey Robinson

  Success, Teaching, School

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• To be sure, it is not the fruits of scientific research that elevate a man and enrich his nature, but the urge to understand, the intellectual work, creative or receptive.

  Albert Einstein

  Nature, Science, Men

  Albert Einstein (2016). “The Albert Einstein Collection: Essays in Humanism, The Theory of Relativity, and The World As I See It”, p.171, Open Road Media

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• Some of the most serious fallacies of traditional economics have been due to confusion between optimum and equilibrium conditions; the apparent influence of Dr. Pangloss upon the development of economic thought is for the most part nothing but pure intellectual error.

  Sir John Richard Hicks

  Errors, Confusion, Drs

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• Modern economics is sick. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing.

  Mark Blaug

  Games, Sick, Understanding

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• The intellectual's hostility to the businessman presents no mystery, as the two have, by function, wholly different standards. While the businessman's motto is the customer is always right, the intellectual's task is to preserve his perceived standards against the weight of popular opinion.

  Bertrand de Jouvenel

  Philosophy, Two, Political

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• It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Philosophy, Ideas, Judging

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• Academic disciplines are subject to being overtaken by attacks of "knowingness"- a state of mind and soul that prevents shudders of awe and makes one immune to enthusiasm.

  Richard Rorty

  Discipline, Soul, Intelligence

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• Almost all rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers.

  John Stuart Mill

  Intelligence, Veins, Half

  John Stuart Mill (2008). “Utilitarianism and On Liberty: Including 'Essay on Bentham' and Selections from the Writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin”, p.67, John Wiley & Sons

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• An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Artist, Intelligence, Following Your Own Path

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• Any slower and he'd be in reverse.

  Andre-Pierre Gignac

  Intelligence, Reverse

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• Cato used to assert that wise men profited more by fools than fools by wise men; for that wise men avoided the faults of fools, but that fools would not imitate the good examples of wise men.

  Plutarch

  Wise, Learning, Men

  Plutarch (2015). “Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans: Top Biography”, p.461, 谷月社

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