Intellectual Quotes - Page 21

• Again and again I am brought up against it, and again and again I resist it: I don't want to believe it, even though it is almost palpable: the vast majority lack an intellectual conscience; indeed, it often seems to me that to demand such a thing is to be in the most populous cities as solitary as in the desert.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Believe, Cities, Majority

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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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• 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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• Whatever we believe about ourselves and our ability comes true for us.

  Susan L. Taylor

  Inspirational, Happiness, Success

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• Anecdote: Greatness Means Leading the Way. No stream is large and copious of itself, but becomes great by receiving and leading on so many tributary streams. It is so, also, with all intellectual greatness, It is only a question of someone indicating the direction to be followed by so many affluent; not whether he was richly or poorly gifted originally.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Mean, Greatness, Receiving

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• Three sorts of goods, Aristotle specified, contribute to happiness: goods of the soul, including moral and intellectual virtues and education; bodily goods, such as strength, good health, beauty, and sound senses; and external goods, such as wealth, friends, good birth, good children, good heredity, good reputation and the like.

  Sissela Bok

  Happiness, Children, Soul

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• Now, as I move through my fifties, I can be professional and domestic, creative and intellectual, patient and urgent. I have learned that we should never settle for someone else's definition of who we can be. Growing to this age, I realize, is kind of like feeling your voice deepen. It's still your voice, but it has more substance, and it sounds like it knows its own origins.

  Susan Sarandon

  Moving, Voice, Creative

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• I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.

  Bill Ayers

  Learning, Intelligence, Wish

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• Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.

  Cyril Connolly

  Revenge, Intelligence, Genius

  Cyril Connolly (1975). “The evening colonnade”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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• Rescue the drowning and tie your shoestrings.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Teaching, Ties, Intelligence

  Henry David Thoreau (1882). “Walden”, p.124

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• It is, indeed, only in old age that intellectual men attain their sublime expression, whilst portraits of them in their youth show only the first traces of it.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Men, Expression, Sublime

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2012). “Collected Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer”, p.194, Simon and Schuster

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• I am convinced that we will never build a democratic state based on rule of law if we do not at the same time build a state that is-regardless of how unscientific this may sound to the ears of a political scientist-humane, moral, intellectual and spiritual, and cultural.

  Vaclav Havel

  Spiritual, Hero, Law

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• Agnosticism is not properly described as a "negative" creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle which is as much ethical as intellectual.

  Thomas Huxley

  Principles, Negative, Kind

  Thomas Henry Huxley (2012). “Lectures and Essays”, p.247, tredition

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• Precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity as to those mysterious powers assumed by others.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Atheism, Weakness, Mysterious

  Charles Caleb Colton (1828). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words Addressed to Those who Think”, p.76

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• But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler's discovery of planetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empirical explorations of intellectual processes in machines should lead to a science, eventually.

  Marvin Minsky

  Science, Discovery, Astrology

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• Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Sports, Science, Discipline

  "Chaos: Making a New Science". Book by James Gleick, p. 70, 1987.

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• Though the parallel is not complete, it is safe to say that science will never touch them unaided by its practical applications. Its wonders may be catalogued for purposes of education, they may be illustrated by arresting experiments, by numbers and magnitudes which startle or fatigue the imagination but they will form no familiar portion of the intellectual furniture of ordinary men unless they be connected, however remotely, with the conduct of ordinary life.

  Arthur Balfour

  Education, Science, Men

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• We must also teach science not as the bare body of fact, but more as human endeavor in its historic context-in the context of the effects of scientific thought on every kind of thought. We must teach it as an intellectual pursuit rather than as a body of tricks.

  Isidor Isaac Rabi

  Teaching, Science, History

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• Truth and falsity, indeed understanding, is not necessarily something purely intellectual, remote from feelings and attitudes. ... It is in the total conduct of men rather than in their statements that truth or falsehood lives, more in what a man does, in his real reaction to other men and to things, in his will to do them justice, to live at one with them. Here lies the inner connection between truth and justice. In the realm of behavior and action, the problem recurs as to the difference between piece and part.

  Max Wertheimer

  Life, Attitude, Real

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• How strange it would be if the final theory were to be discovered in our lifetimes! The discovery of the final laws of nature will mark a discontinuity in human intellectual history, the sharpest that has occurred since the beginning of modern science in the seventeenth century. Can we now imagine what that would be like?

  Steven Weinberg

  Science, Discovery, Law

  Steven Weinberg (1992). “Dreams of a Final Theory”, Pantheon

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• I approached the bulk of my schoolwork as a chore rather than an intellectual adventure. The tedium was relieved by a few courses that seem to be qualitatively different. Geometry was the first exciting course I remember. Instead of memorizing facts, we were asked to think in clear, logical steps. Beginning from a few intuitive postulates, far reaching consequences could be derived, and I took immediately to the sport of proving theorems.

  Steven Chu

  Sports, Adventure, Science

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• Modern mathematics, that most astounding of intellectual creations, has projected the mind's eye through infinite time and the mind's hand into boundless space.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Eye, Science, Hands

  Nicholas Murray Butler (1895). “What Knowledge is of Most Worth? ...”

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• A fool must now and then be right, by chance

  William Cowper

  Truth, Humorous, Intelligence

  "Conversation" l. 96 (1782)

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• Mathematics is an interesting intellectual sport but it should not be allowed to stand in the way of obtaining sensible information about physical processes.

  Richard Hamming

  Sports, Interesting, Information

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• To a mind of sufficient intellectual power, the whole of mathematics would appear trivial, as trivial as the statement that a four-footed animal is an animal.

  Bertrand Russell

  Animal, Mind, Four

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell”, p.230, Routledge

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