Intellectual Life Quotes - Page 2

• I have never heard of anyone who was a "model person" in all aspects of his or her life, intellectual life or other aspects; nor do I see why anyone should care. We are not engaged in idol worship, after all.

  Noam Chomsky

  Idols, Intellectual, Care

  Source: www.publicanthropology.org

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• I'm committed to the idea that one of the few things human beings have to offer is the richness of unconscious and conscious emotional responses to being alive. ... The kind of esteem that's given to brightness/smartness obliterates average people or slow learners from participating fully in human life, particularly technical and intellectual life. But you cannot exclude any human being from emotional participation.

  Ntozake Shange

  Emotional, Ideas, Average

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• I think it is time for a new pride in the intellectual life, and a new impatience with people who take pride in ignorance, or somehow use "elite" to mean "person who has taken the time to know" and then are eager to dismiss, say, striving, or the notion that improving one's self out of difficult conditions is a noble thing.

  George Saunders

  Taken, Ignorance, Mean

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• There's a tradition in British intellectual life of mocking any non-political force that gets involved in politics, especially within the sphere of the arts and the theatre.

  Harold Pinter

  Art, Political, Intellectual

  "Pinter: I won't be silenced". Interview with Matthew Tempest, www.theguardian.com. August 3, 2001.

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• Capitalist agricultural production prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural labourer.

  Karl Marx

  Men, Intellectual, Fertility

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (2016). “Delphi Collected Works of Karl Marx (Illustrated)”, p.1529, Delphi Classics

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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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• People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Knowing, People, Intellectual

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.491, Library of America

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• The Greeks, those originators of the intellectual life, fixed for us the idea of the poet. He was a divine man; more sacred than the priest, who was at best an intermediary between men and the gods, but in the poet the god was present and spoke.

  George Edward Woodberry

  Men, Origin Of Life, Ideas

  George Edward Woodberry (1920). “The Torch, and Other Lectures and Addresses”

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• There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.

  Steven Pinker

  Intellectual, Guilt, Western Culture

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• No vital Christianity is possible unless at least three aspects of it are developed. These are the inner life of devotion, the outer life of service, and the intellectual life of rationality.

  D. Elton Trueblood

  Christian, Intellectual, Three

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• Literature is a comprehensive essence of the intellectual life of a nation.

  William Shakespeare

  Essence, Intellectual, Literature

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• The goal of intellectual life should be to see and understand what is true, not merely to adhere to a prevailing orthodoxy.

  Jeffrey Tucker

  Goal, Intellectual, Orthodoxy

  FaceBook post by Jeffrey A. Tucker from Sep 10, 2014

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• Greed probably figures in my intellectual life as well, as I attempt to absorb a massive amount of information with consequent mental indigestion.

  Etty Hillesum

  Greed, Intellectual, Information

  Etty Hillesum, K. A. D. Smelik, Arnold Pomerans (2002). “Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943”, p.146, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.

  Siri Hustvedt

  Order, Personality, Intellectual

  Siri Hustvedt (2010). “The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves”, p.138, Macmillan

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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

  Intellectual, Academia, Virtue

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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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• 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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• What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Inspirational, Greatness, Thinking

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.263, Library of America

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• Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them

  Lev S. Vygotsky

  Children, Intellectual, Social

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• Research must continue to be the centerpiece of intellectual life, and our commitment to research must grow, because our problems are growing.

  Ernest L. Boyer

  Education, Commitment, Intellectual

  Ernest L. Boyer (1997). “Ernest L. Boyer, Selected Speeches, 1979-1995”, Jossey-Bass

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• History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff - well, it might as well be dead.

  Arnold J. Toynbee

  Historical, Intellectual, Use

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• French intellectual life has, in my opinion, been turned into something cheap and meretricious by the 'star' system. It is like Hollywood. Thus we go from one absurdity to another - Stalinism, existentialism. Lacan, Derrida - some of them obscene ( Stalinism), some simply infantile and ridiculous ( Lacan, Derrida). What is striking, however, is the pomposity and self-importance, at each stage.

  Noam Chomsky

  Stars, Self, Intellectual

  Noam Chomsky, Jean Bricmont, Julie Franck (2010). “Chomsky Notebook”, p.72, Columbia University Press

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• As for the excellent little wretches who grow up in what they are taught, with never a scruple or a query, ... they signify nothing in the intellectual life of the race.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Life, Growing Up, Teaching

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• I can't imagine a secular life, a spiritual life, an intellectual life, a physical life. I mean, we would be completely wrought with schizophrenia, wouldn't we?

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Spiritual, Mean, Intellectual

  Terry Tempest Williams (2006). “A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams”, Utah State Univ Pr

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• The intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful, if man will live the life of nature, and not import into his mind difficulties which are none of his.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Live Life, Men, Intellectual

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.48, Graphic Arts Books

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