Intellect Quotes - Page 36

• How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even one's own parents: if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures. Hasn't this had some effect on my life as a militant--has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of pure intellect, of pure mathematical calculation?

  Antonio Gramsci

  Strong, People, Parent

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• Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failures.

  Oscar Wilde

  Failure, Emotional, Consistency

  Oscar Wilde (2012). “The Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde”, p.102, Courier Corporation

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• These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius.

  Michael Cunningham

  Kindness, Believe, Tired

  Michael Cunningham (1998). “The Hours: A Novel”, p.18, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

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• you and I have good enough minds to know how very limited and finite they really are. The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Mind, Naked, Good Enough

  Madeleine L'Engle (2013). “A Wrinkle in Time Trilogy”, p.181, Macmillan

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• ...I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.— Let each man hope & believe what he can.—

  Charles Darwin

  Dog, Believe, Knowledge

  Charles Darwin, Frederick Burkhardt (1993). “The Correspondence of Charles Darwin:”, p.224, Cambridge University Press

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• We may insist as often as we like that man's intellect is powerless in comparison to his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it will not rest until it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.

  Sigmund Freud

  Men, Voice, Weakness

  Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Anna Freud, Carrie Lee Rothgeb (1961). “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud”

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• All have not the same capacity. I would allow a man of intellect to earn more, I would not cramp his talent.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Men, Talent, Capacity

  Mahatma Gandhi (2005). “All Men Are Brothers”, p.135, A&C Black

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• We know not through our intellect but through our experience.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Knows

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• You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.

  Mark Twain

  Love, Heart, Law

  Mark Twain (1889). “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court”, p.164, Createspace Independent Pub

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• You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world, you also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.

  Richard Dawkins

  Giving, Understanding, Tutorial

  "The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder". BBC1 Television, November 12, 1996.

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• We were always loyal to lost causes...Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. ~ Professor MacHugh

  James Joyce

  Imagination, Loyal, Causes

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• But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.

  Oscar Wilde

  Real, Exaggeration Is, Expression

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Joseph Bristow, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: The picture of Dorian Gray : the 1890 and 1891 texts”, p.170, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• As every writer knows... there is something mysterious about the writer's ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is 'hot', an invisible wall seems to fall away, and the writer moves easily and surely from one kind of reality to another... Every writer has experienced at least moments of this strange, magical state. Reading student fiction one can spot at once where the power turns on and where it turns off, where the writer writes from 'inspiration' or deep, flowing vision, and where he had to struggle along on mere intellect.

  John Gardner

  Wall, Struggle, Moving

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• What pleases the public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect; but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem.

  Thomas Mann

  Passionate, Demand, Vivid

  Thomas Mann (2010). “Death in Venice: And Seven Other Stories”, p.12, Vintage

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• It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. . . . But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not coward enough to admire it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Personality, Enemy

  "The Man Who Was Thursday". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, Ch. VI : The Exposure, 1908.

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• The intellect is good but until it has become the servant of the heart, it is of little avail.

  Abdu'l-Bahá

  Heart, Littles, Servant

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• If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance

  Michael Cunningham

  Running, Religious, Soul

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• For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.

  John Milton

  Life, Book, Soul

  'Areopagitica' (1644) p. 4

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• Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Passion, People

  Oscar Wilde (2013). “The Essential Oscar Wilde”, p.119, Simon and Schuster

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• We came to realise - first with astonishment, then bitterness, and finally with indifference - that intellect apparently wasn't the most important thing...not ideas, but the system; not freedom, but drill. We had joined up with enthusiasm and with good will; but they did everything to knock that out of us.

  Erich Maria Remarque

  Ideas, Important, Astonishment

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• Some people seek meaning in life through personal gain, through personal relationship, or through personal experiences. However, it seems to me that being blessed with the intellect to divine the ultimate secrets of nature gives meaning enough to life.

  Michio Kaku

  Blessed, People, Giving

  FaceBook post by Dr. Michio Kaku from Feb 16, 2010

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• It is practically an axiom in psychiatry that precocious intellect combined with physical weakness can give rise to many unpleasant character traits - avarice, delusions of grandeur , and obsessive masturbation, to name just a few.

  Sam Savage

  Character, Names, Giving

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• In seminary he had been taught that God had completely stopped any overt communication with moderns, preferring to have them only listen to and follow sacred Scripture, properly interpreted, of course. God's voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects. It seemed that direct communication with God was something exclusively for the ancients and uncivilized, while educated Westerner's access to God was mediated and controlled by the intelligentsia. Nobody wanted God in a box, just in a book.

  William P. Young

  Book, Communication, Voice

  "The Shack". Book by William P. Young, books.google.ru. June 20, 2008.

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• Before this moment I'd lived as a mind. Body, heart, soul, intellect, so we care ourselves into parts. But the whole of us, what can it be?

  Denis Johnson

  Heart, Soul, Mind

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• Feelings are much stronger than thoughts. We are all led by instinct, and our intellect catches up later

  Bono

  Feelings, Stronger, Instinct

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