Intellect Idea Quotes & Sayings

We must suit the flattery to the mind and taste of the recipient. We do not put essences into hogsheads, nor porter into phials. Delicate minds may be disgusted by compliments that would please a grosser intellect; as some fine ladies who would be shocked at the idea of a dram will not refuse a liqueur. — Charles Caleb Colton

If men were but to read the New Testament with the same tone and emphasis, with which they do other books, and were to keep out of mind the idea of its being sacred, they would be disgusted with the credulity, and the want of intellect, reason and judgment, that is apparent in it. — Lysander Spooner

Muslims must be warned that plagiarists and pretenders as well as ignorant imitators affect great mischief by debasing values, imposing upon the ignorant, and encouraging the rise of mediocrity. The appropriate original ideas for hasty implementation and make false claims for themselves. Original ideas cannot be implemented when vulgarized; on the contrary, what is praiseworthy in them will turn out to become blameworthy, and their rejection will follow with the dissatisfaction that will emerge. So in this way authentic and creative intellectual effort will continually be sabotaged. It is not surprising that the situation arising out of the loss of adab also provides the breeding ground for the emergence of extremists who make ignorance their capital. — Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas

Diversity is not a politically correct idea. Diversity in a boardroom or in a Parliament means that you just have different minds, different life experience, different ways of thinking about patients or customers or voters so that when you bring that intellect, you look at opportunity and risk, and then you have it in much better balance. — Jenny Shipley

Man is a willful and covetous animal, who makes use of his intellect to satisfy his inclinations, but who cares nothing for truth, who rebels against personal discipline, who hates disinterested thought and the idea of self-education. Wisdom offends him, because it rouses in him disturbance and confusion, and because he will not see himself as he is. — Henri Frederic Amiel

He was a marvelous talker, a magical talker, and I wish I were able to give a better idea what he said, but it is impossible for a mediocre intellect to render the speech of a superior one — Donna Tartt

Men of dreams, the lovers and the poets, are better in most things than the men of my sort; the men of intellect. You take your being from your mothers. You live to the full: it is given you to love with your whole strength, to know and taste the whole of life. We thinkers, though often we seem to rule you, cannot live with half your joy and full reality. Ours is a thin and arid life, but the fullness of being is yours; yours the sap of the fruit, the garden of lovers, the joyous pleasaunces of beauty. Your home is the earth, ours the idea of it. Your danger is to be drowned in the world of sense, ours to gasp for breath in airless space. You are a poet, I a thinker. You sleep on your mother's breast, I watch in the wilderness. On me there shines the sun; on you the moon with all the stars. Your dreams are all of girls, mine of boys - — Hermann Hesse

But a man's relationship to the world is determined not just by his intellect but by his feelings and by his who aggregate of spiritual forces. However much one implies or explains to a person that all that truly exists is no more than an idea, or that everything is made up of atoms, or that the essence of life is substance or will, or that heat, light, movement and electricity are only manifestations of one and the same energy; however much you explain this to a man - a being who feels, suffers, rejoices, fears and hopes - it will not explain his place in the universe. — Leo Tolstoy

The beginnings of Algebra I found far more difficult, perhaps as a result of bad teaching, I was made to learn by heart: 'The square of the sum of two numbers is equal to the sum of their squares increased by twice their product.' I had not the vaguest idea what this meant, and when I could not remember the words, my tutor threw the book at my head, which did not stimulate my intellect in any way. — Bertrand Russell

But what of the seemingly more fanciful idea that the internet might one day "wake up"? Could the internet become something more than just the backbone of a loosely integrated collective superintelligence - something more like a virtual skull housing an emerging unified super-intellect? (This — Nick Bostrom

No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man; no other idea has so fruitfully stimulated his intellect; yet no other concept stands in greater need of clarification than that of the infinite. — David Hilbert

We seem to have lost our contact with the primordial: the idea of - call it divine revelation as opposed to something that's learned by the human intellect - something that, if you lay yourself completely open, and you just open your heart completely, something will actually come into it. — John Tavener

The whole idea of the pursuit of goods and possessions has completely corrupted the human experience, along with religion, which I think limits the intellect. — George Carlin

You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles whe na carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself.
Ina man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The approach of intellect or noesis will forever be an effete and limited sort of thing by contrast with the vigor and color of gnosis; but in academia there is virtually nothing but noetic minds to be found, and the very idea of gnosis is alien and untranslatable, not to mention discreditable. — Kenny Smith

Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea. — Primo Levi

Anyone who can rationalize love through intellect, has no idea what love is, for it is an emotion, and cannot be rationalized. For love is crazy. — L.D. Davis

From the time when the exercise of the intellect became a source of strength and of wealth, we see that every addition to science, every fresh truth, and every new idea became a germ of power placed within the reach of the people. Poetry, eloquence, and memory, the graces of the mind, the fire of imagination, depth of thought, and all the gifts which Heaven scatters at a venture turned to the advantage of democracy; and even when they were in the possession of its adversaries, they still served its cause by throwing into bold relief the natural greatness of man. Its conquests spread, therefore, with those of civilization and knowledge; and literature became an arsenal open to all, where the poor and the weak daily resorted for arms. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Religion is a human attempt to understand the complexity of nature, but nature cannot be fully understood by human intellect, which is why most religions require blind faith to make up for a lack of evidence. The reason it is impossible to know nature is because that which is perceived to be nature is only the idea of nature aspiring in each person's mind. When we give names to things, we isolate them from nature and nature is not seen in its true form. An object seen in isolation from the whole is not the real thing. — Joseph P. Kauffman

The idea of decimation as a lottery converts the new iconography of the Burgess Shale into a radical view about the pathways of life and the nature of history ... May our poor and improbable species find joy in its new-found fragility and good fortune! Wouldn't anyone with the slightest sense of adventure, or the most weakly flickering respect for intellect, gladly exchange the old cosmic comfort for a look at something so weird and wonderful - yet so real - as *Opabinia*? — Stephen Jay Gould

An unbending and absolute acceptance of any idea is a sure sign of a small mind, no matter the greatness of intellect possesed by the one accepting that idea. — Derek R. Audette

The idea that athleticism was suddenly inversely proportional to intellect was never a cause of bigotry, but rather a result of it. — David Epstein

I think it is harder to write a story that appeals to the intellect. But, when you tie onto one, you can do it quite deeply. It really depends on the type of idea you have to begin with. — Stephen King

Sophronia had no idea why Felix was so intent upon her. She had not yet received lessons in seduction, or she might have understood the appeal of sharp confidence, a topping figure, and green eyes. All Sophronia's intellect was directed at something other than attracting male companionship. These things combined to make her particularly appealing to gentlemen.
Soap could have told her that. — Gail Carriger

It as an argument between the world of emotion versus the world of the intellect. It's the idea that you can suppress a person's mind and a person's experiences, mentally, psychologically and intellectually, but you can't completely quiet them to the point of dormancy and the emotionally life a person. You still have the heart and what the heart remembers and what the heart experiences. And even that isn't important that that comes across. — Colin Farrell

As far as anyone could tell, Portia had learned to partition its cognitive processes: almost as if it were emulating a larger brain piece by piece, saving the results of one module to feed into the next. Slices of intellect, built and demolished one after another. No one would ever know for sure - a rogue synthophage had taken out the world's Salticids before anyone had gotten around to taking a closer look - but the Icarus slime mold seemed to have taken the same basic idea and run with it. — Peter Watts

The witness is frequent and insistent that God is inherently relational and personal. So God cannot be either received or understood apart from our being personal and realtional as well. That most emphatically excludes the detached intellect as a way of knowing God. It excludes programmatic work as a way of knowing God. It excludes cultivation of the ecstatic and visionary as a way of knowing God. God is not an abstract idea that can be mastered, not an impersonal force that can be used, not a private experience that can be indulged." Eugene Peterson, "Living the Resurrection" (106). — Eugene H. Peterson

Elephants? Really? My God, what does he see in you? Certainly not your intellect or wit, since we've yet to see any evidence it exists. And your idea of a love scene? So Disney, so Family Channel, so dreadfully boring. Really, Ever, may I remind you that Damen's been around for hundreds of years, including the free-love sixties? — Alyson Noel

If his presidency is to represent the full power of the idea that black Americans are just like everyone else - fully human and fully capable of intellect, courage and patriotism - then Barack Obama has to be subject to the same rough and tumble of political criticism experienced by his predecessors. — Juan Williams

The intellect is a cold thing and a merely intellectual idea will never stimulate thought in the same manner that a spiritual idea does. — Ernest Holmes

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, - What is truth? and of the affections, - What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will ... Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit. — Ralph Waldo Emerson