Intellectual Intellect Quotes & Sayings

Communism and socialism, programs for intellectual control over society ... fascism, a program for the social control of intellect. — Robert M. Pirsig

The golden rule for understanding spiritually is not intellect, but obedience. If a man wants scientific knowledge, intellectual curiosity is his guide; but if he wants insight into what Jesus Christ teaches, he can only get it by obedience. — Oswald Chambers

All that I can say is, that the wisest and best men in all ages had agreed in giving the preference, very greatly, to the pleasures of intellect; and that my own experience completely confirmed the truth of their decisions; that I had found sensual pleasures vain, transient, and continually attended with tedium and disgust; but that intellectual pleasures appeared to me ever fresh and young, filled up all my hours satisfactorily, gave a new zest to life, and diffused a lasting serenity over my mind — Thomas Robert Malthus

If one wants to go to Mumbai from Baroda, he will 'like' all the signs towards the south. And if he wants to go to Delhi, he will like all the signs towards the north. One can tell what path he is on from what he 'likes'. There are many paths, not just one. As many minds as there are, there are that many ways and they are all intellect-based opinions. Where one is guided by the intellectual opinions, there is nothing but aimless wandering there. Only the opinions of the Vitaraag Lords (the enlightened ones) is a "safe side"! — Dada Bhagwan

We seemed about to enter an Olympian age in this country, brains and intellect harnessed to great force, the better to define a common good ... It seems long ago now, that excitement which swept through the country, or at least the intellectual reaches of it, that feeling that America was going to change, that the government had been handed down from the tired, flabby chamber-of-commerce mentality of the Eisenhower years to the best and brightest of a generation. — David Halberstam

Insanity on the other hand is an intellectual pattern. It may have biological causes but it has no physical or biological reality. No scientific instrument can be produced in court to show who is insane and who is sane. There's nothing about insanity that conforms to any scientific law of the universe. The scientific laws of the universe are invented by sanity. There's no way by which sanity, using the instruments of its own creation, can measure that which is outside of itself and its creations. Insanity isn't an 'object' of observation. It's an alteration of observation itself. There's no such thing as a 'disease' of patterns of intellect. There's only heresy. And that's what insanity really is. — Robert M. Pirsig

We, the salt of the earth, should endeavor to follow, by never letting anything disturb us in the pursuit of our intellectual life, however much the storm of the world may invade and agitate our personal environment. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Nothing is more dangerous than to stop working. It is a habit that can soon be lost, one that is easily neglected and hard to resume. A measure of day-dreaming is a good thing, like a drug prudently used; it allays the sometimes virulent fever of the over-active mind, like a cool wind blowing through the brain to smooth the harshness of untrammelled thought; it bridges here and there the gaps, brings things into proportion and blunts the sharper angles. But too much submerges and drowns. Woe to the intellectual worker who allows himself to lapse wholly from positive thinking into day-dreaming. He thinks he can easily change back, and tells himself that it is all one. He is wrong! Thought is the work of the intellect, reverie is its self-indulgence. To substitute day-dreaming for thought is to confuse poison with a source of nourishment. — Victor Hugo

The intellectual power, through words and things, Went sounding on a dim and perilous way! — William Wordsworth

Refering to the domain of knowledge, adab means an intellectual discipline (ketertiban budi) which recognizes and acknowledges the hierarchy of knowledge based on the criteria of degrees of perfection (keluhuran) and priority (keutamaan) such that the ones that are based on revelation are recognized and acknowledged as more perfect and of a higher priority than those based on the intellect; those that are fard 'ayn are above fard kifayah; those that provide guidance (hidayah) to life are more superior to those that are practically useful (kegunaan amali). Adab towards knowledge would result in the proper and correct ways of learning and applying different sciences. — Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

One with higher 'revolutions' of intellect has a higher power of understanding. He will understand before explanation becomes necessary. Laborers do not have even five 'revolutions' per minute and an intellectual has one to two thousand 'revolutions' per minute. The higher the 'revolutions, the quicker he will understand this 'Science' [Akram Vignan]. — Dada Bhagwan

Compare King William with the philosopher Haeckel. The king is one of the anointed by the most high, as they claim - one upon whose head has been poured the divine petroleum of authority. Compare this king with Haeckel, who towers an intellectual colossus above the crowned mediocrity. Compare George Eliot with Queen Victoria. The Queen is clothed in garments given her by blind fortune and unreasoning chance, while George Eliot wears robes of glory woven in the loom of her own genius.
The world is beginning to pay homage to intellect, to genius, to heart.
We have advanced. We have reaped the benefit of every sublime and heroic self-sacrifice, of every divine and brave act; and we should endeavor to hand the torch to the next generation, having added a little to the intensity and glory of the flame. — Robert G. Ingersoll

As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude. — Sigmund Freud

Since art is a virtue of the intellect, it demands to communicate with the entire universe of the intellect. Hence it is that the normal climate of art is intelligence and knowledge: its normal soil, the civilized heritage of a consistent and integrated system of beliefs and values; its normal horizon , the infinity of human experience enlighted by the passionate insight of anguish or the intellectual virtues of a contemplative mind. — Jacques Maritain

It is a convenient truth: You go into the humanities to pursue your intellectual passion; and it just so happens, as a by-product, that you emerge as a desired commodity for industry. — Damon Horowitz

I think there's too much mixing fashion and intellect. Fashion ultimately is designed to cover the human body, to give you joy, to make you feel better. I don't think it has to have a great intellectual meaning. — Suzy Menkes

Today, the world rewards those with creative and intellectual muscles. So, women and skinny men need to shut up and start thinking. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Intellectual growth is when you surpass the barrier of puerility, puzzling people with your dazzling creativity. — Michael Bassey Johnson

God's greatest gift to mankind is our intellect. Even for those of you who are not of the faithful, the sheer logic alone cannot be denied. Education lifts a people to greater ability and achievement. — Aleksandra Layland

It is the nature of intellect to strive to improve in intellectual power. — Hosea Ballou

The incompetent always present thmeselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as devout, usurers as benefactors, the small minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant, and teh feeble-minded as intellectual. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Intelligence is a way of thinking, not a choice of words. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

When the intellect and affections are in harmony; when intellectual consciousness is calm and deep; inspiration will not be confounded with fancy. — Margaret Fuller

Simply to render oneself able to understand what other Christian thinkers have themselves come to understand and to more or less felicitously communicate requires that one's mind not be a blank slate but already properly formed, disciplined, and exercised. — Gregory B. Sadler

The intellectual quest is exquisite like pearls and coral, But it is not the same as the spiritual quest. The spiritual quest is on another level altogether, Spiritual wine has a subtler taste. The intellect and the senses investigate cause and effect. The spiritual seeker surrenders to the wonder. — Rumi

All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move toward rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold,or do not hold, is looked on as matter of indifference. They can me granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. — George Orwell

One can be granted intellectual liberty when one has no intellect. — George Orwell

There stood one, in physical proportion and stature commanding and exact - in intellect richly endowed - in natural eloquence a prodigy - in soul manifestly "created but a little lower than the angels" - yet a slave, ay, a fugitive slave, - trembling for his safety, hardly daring to believe that on the American soil, a single white person could be found who would befriend him at all hazards, for the love of God and humanity! Capable of high attainments as an intellectual and moral being - needing nothing but a comparatively small amount of cultivation to make him an ornament to society and a blessing to his race - by the law of the land, by the voice of the people, by the terms of the slave code, he was only a piece of property, a beast of burden, a chattel personal, nevertheless! — Anonymous

I have problems with a religion which says that faith in itself is enough for a ticket to heaven. In other words, that the ideal is your ability to manipulate your own common sense to accept something your intellect rejects. It's the same model of intellectual submission that dictatorships have used throughout time, the concept of a higher reasoning without any obligation to discharge the burden of proof. — Jo Nesbo

When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense by the pains which he takes to secure for his children that intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that he becomes the founder of a family. — Henry David Thoreau

The most crucial problem with intellectual learning is that it receives the unknown on the grounds of the known. — Raheel Farooq

Real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful. Your — Oscar Wilde

Jesus did not get stuck in intellectual arguments with people. He did not go for the intellect; He went for the conscience. He spoke to that part of the person that knows the difference between right and wrong instinctively. — Kirk Cameron

The superior man is he who develops, in harmonious proportions, his moral, intellectual, and physical nature. — Unknown

But Aristotle's philosophy was the intellect's Declaration of Independence. — Ayn Rand

I believe in a world where there are no heroes, and I've read and know humanity a lot. There are moments that I admire in a person courage, intellect, hard work. These are the qualities I admire in an intellectual, in a writer, and there are so many people who have these things. — Orhan Pamuk

Mental ghettos are not mirages; they actually exist in palpable reality: being "open" inside one's mental or intellectual ghetto does not open its door but simply allows one to harbour the illusion that there is no ghetto and no door. The most dangerous prisons are those with invisible bars. — Tariq Ramadan

Nothing is more human than for man to desire naturally things impossible to his nature. It is, indeed, the property of a nature which is not closed up in matter like the nature of physical things, but which is intellectual or infinitized by the spirit. It is the property of a metaphysical nature. Such desires reach for the infinite, because the intellect thirsts for being and being is infinite. — Jacques Maritain

No true manhood can be trained by a merely intellectual process. You cannot train men by the intellect alone; you must train them by the heart. — Joseph Parker

If mind is seen not as a threat but as a guide to emotion, if intellect is seen neither as a guarantee of character nor as an inevitable danger to it, if theory is conceived as something serviceable but not necessarily subordinate or inferior to practice, and if our democratic aspirations are defined in such realistic and defensible terms as to admit of excellence, all these supposed antagonisms lose their force. — Richard Hofstadter

Ghettos have their own characteristics and consequences :
be they physical. social, intellectual or mental, those who live in them always nurture projection of themselves or world around them that are more imaginary than true.
In the ghettos of the intellect and idealistic theories, there are a lot of intertolerant and racist people who do not realize that they are. — Tariq Ramadan

There is in the chemist a form of thought by which all ideas become visible in the mind as strains of an imagined piece of music. This form of thought is developed in Faraday in the highest degree, whence it arises that to one who is not acquainted with this method of thinking, his scientific works seem barren and dry, and merely a series of researches strung together, while his oral discourse when he teaches or explains is intellectual, elegant, and of wonderful clearness. — Justus Von Liebig

Today I have lost one of my dearest friends, England one of her greatest men. Keith Joseph understood that it was necessary to win again the intellectual argument for freedom, and that to do this we must start from first principles. He was in many ways an unlikely revolutionary. For all his towering intellect, he was deeply humble. He spoke out boldly, however hostile the audience. Yet he hated to give offence. Above all, his integrity shone out in everything he said and did. His best memorial lies in the younger generations of politicians whom he inspired. But for me he is irreplaceable. — Margaret Thatcher

An intellectual is some one who isn't exactly distinguished by his intellect. He claims that label to compensates for his inadequacies. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then is he caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

If intellect could be acquired from books, nobody would have been more intellectual than a book monger. — Kunal Narayan Uniyal

If you take an objection in the 'relative', it is intellectual rationalism. 'We' don't have intellectual rationalism. 'We' are abuddha (do not have intellect) in the 'relative', and we are a Gnani [the enlightened one] in the 'real'. — Dada Bhagwan

An intellectual, heartless man never becomes an inspired man. It is always the heart that speaks in the man of love; it discovers a greater instrument than intellect can give you, the instrument of inspiration. — Swami Vivekananda

Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties. — James Anthony Froude

People tend not to use this word beauty because it's not intellectual - but there has to be an overlap between beauty and intellect. — Tadao Ando

It is a sign of intellectual maturity to always crawl to conclusions. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

If you try to learn with your intellect, it is more difficult to absorb the teachings on a deep level. The mind looks at something and says, I don't want that; I want this instead. But as you simply continue to train, something changes. What changes is deeper than your intellectual knowledge, deeper than mind or heart. — Linda Holiday

Reason, intellect, and logic are historical phenomena. There is a history of logic as there is a history of technology. Nothing suggests that logic as we know it is the last and final stage of intellectual evolution. Human logic is a historical phase between prehuman nonlogic on the one hand and superhuman logic on the other hand. Reason and mind, the human beings' most efficacious equipment in their struggle for survival, are embedded in the continuous flow of zoological events. They are neither eternal nor unchangeable. They are transitory. — Ludwig Von Mises

The English mind is intelligent rather than intellectual. The French are intellectual in the sense that the intellect is emancipated and left free to run its own course. — Ralph Barton Perry

He was a man of most subtle and refined intellect. A man of culture, charm, and distinction. One of the most intellectual men I ever met."
"I prefer a gentlemanly fool any day. There is more to be said for stupidity than people imagine. Personally I have a great admiration for stupidity. It is a sort of fellow-feeling, I suppose. — Oscar Wilde

Our Lord had no design of constructing a system of truth in intellectual forms. The truth of the moment in its relation to him, The Truth, was what he spoke. He spoke out of a region of realities which he knew could only be suggested - not represented - in the forms of intellect and speech. With vivid flashes of life and truth his words invade our darkness, rousing us with sharp stings of light to will our awaking, to arise from the dead and cry for the light which he can give, not in the lightning of words only, but in indwelling presence and power. — George MacDonald

Remember, intelligence is not part of the mind. Intellect is, but intelligence is not; hence, the intellectual is full of mind but in life he behaves very unintelligently. He has a certain expertise, he is trained intellectually to, do a certain thing, his mind is functioning like a computer. But life is not one-dimensional, you cannot exhaust it in one expertise; it is multi-dimensional. — Rajneesh

It is now established by verifiable evidence that religion stultifies the brain and is the great obstacle in the path of intellectual progress.
The more religious a person is, the more he is steeped in ignorance and superstition, the less is his sense of moral responsibility. The more intelligent a person, the less religious he is. There is an old saying that 'where there are three scientists, there are two atheists.'
The countries whose governments are dominated by religion and religious institutions are the most backward. By the same token, the countries whose people are the most enlightened, and whose governments are based upon the principle of secularism - the separation of church and state - are the most progressive.
And let me tell you: When man is intellectually free, the progress he will make is beyond calculation. — Joseph Lewis

He had thought more than other men, and in matters of the intellect he had that calm objectivity, that certainty of thought and knowledge, such as only really intellectual men have, who have no axe to grind, who never wish to shine, or to talk others down, or to appear always in the right. — Hermann Hesse

One thing I learned on my sporadic spiritual journey was that mainstream culture's disdain and disrespect for the intellectual integrity of Christianity is unwarranted, and its conceited assumption that Christian beliefs are a product of blind faith, bereft of reason and intellect, is completely false. — David Limbaugh

That was the way with Casaubon's hard intellectual labours. Their most characteristic result was not the 'Key to all Mythologies', but a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he had not demonstrably merited - a perpetual suspicious conjecture that the views entertained of him were not to his advantage - a melancholy absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and a passionate resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing.
Thus his intellectual ambition which seemed to others to have absorbed and dried him, was really no security against wounds — George Eliot

What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked upon as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty becasue they have no intellect. — George Orwell

There is, therefore, a more perfect intellectual life in the angels. In them the intellect does not proceed to self-knowledge from anything exterior, but knows itself through itself ... — Thomas Aquinas

The point of Christian scholarship is not recognition by standards established in the wider culture. The point is to praise God with the mind. Such efforts will lead to the kind of intellectual integrity that sometimes receives recognition. But for the Christian that recognition is only a fairly inconsequential by-product. The real point is valuing what God has made, believing that the creation is as "good" as he said it was, and exploring the fullest dimensions of what it meant for the Son of God to "become flesh and dwell among us." Ultimately, intellectual work of this sort is its own reward, because it is focused on the only One whose recognition is important, the One before whom all hearts are open. — Mark A. Noll

There are many things in our society masquerading as faith. What many see as faith may actually be just force of habit, patriotism, stubbornness, family pride, intellectual laziness, childishness, gullibility, or the effects of being brainwashed. The problem is that faith is kept separate from intellect, whereas God wants every part of a Christian, including his mind. — William Hemsworth

He moved on from Anatole France to the eighteenth-century philosophers, though not to Rousseau. Perhaps this was because one side of him - the side easily moved by passion - was too close to Rousseau. Instead, he approached the author of 'Candide', who was closer to another side of him - the cool and richly intellectual side.
At twenty-nine, life no longer held any brightness for him, but Voltaire supplied him with man-made wings.
Spreading these man-made wings, he soared with ease into the sky. The higher he flew, the farther below him sank the joys and sorrows of a life bathed in the light of intellect. Dropping ironies and smiles upon the shabby towns below, he climbed through the open sky, straight for the sun - as if he had forgotten about that ancient Greek who plunged to his death in the ocean when his man-made wings were singed by the sun. — Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Antonio Gramsci said that social reformers should have pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. This means that one must have the intellectual ability to see how bad things are and the emotional ability to look forward with hope. It's a hard combination to sustain, but if you can do it, you can change the world. — Andrew Solomon

The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour perfectly harmonised; it is true to life. On the other hand, the intellectual attainments of the mere man of learning are like a large palette, full of all sorts of colours, which at most are systematically arranged, but devoid of harmony, connection and meaning. — Arthur Schopenhauer

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. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful. — Anonymous

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

Perfect understanding of the infinite requires limitless intellectual capacity; our undivided attention is better suited for humbler aspirations. — Wayne Gerard Trotman

It must be granted that many aspects of the intellectual life of that era showed energy and grandeur. We moderns explain its concomitant uncertainty and falseness as a symptom of the horror which seized men when at the end of an era of apparent victory and success they found themselves suddenly confronting a void: great material scarcity, a period of political and military crises, and an accelerating distrust of the intellect itself, of its own virtue and dignity and even of its own existence. Yet that very period, filled though it was with premonitions of doom, was marked by some very fine intellectual achievements, — Hermann Hesse

Applause is an instinctive, unconscious act expressing the sympathy between actors and audience. Just as our art demands more instinct than intellect in its exercise, so we demand of those who watch us an apppreciation of the simple unconscious kind which finds an outlet in clapping rather than the cold intellectual approval which would self-consciously think applause derogatory. I have yet to meet the actor who was sincere in saying that he disliked applause. — Ellen Terry

Failure to find the truth is perhaps an intellectual defeat, but failure to look for the truth is an intellectual surrender. — Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

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

Feel like Christ and you will be a Christ; feel like Buddha and you will be a Buddha. It is feeling that is the life, the strength, the vitality, without which no amount of intellectual activity can reach God. It is through the heart that the Lord is seen, and not through the intellect. — Swami Vivekananda

The forefathers of the United States were children of religious bigotry and persecution, and, as a result, fled Britain to create a new approach to life and government. They valued intellect and education. In fact, they outlined the principles of the United States' democracy to establish intellectual freedom from the Church. — Mike Medavoy

Most philosophers do not want intellectual matters to reduce to a question of morality (obedience or rebellion to God's Word). They want to hold the intellect or reason to be above matters of moral volition. They hold that truth is obtainable and testable no matter what ethical condition the thinker is in.
Hence, they maintain that all disputes must be rationally resolvable, and a rational case for a philosophic position relies on a valid chain of discursive argumentation that takes us back to incontestable first principles or facts. — Greg L. Bahnsen

The fragility of the intellectual is the same as the poet's:
It's all about the I and its desperate sense of the we. — Prageeta Sharma

Human as an intellectual being needs answers about the existence for the purpose of knowing the way to live. — Zaman Ali

A common misconception of education comes when the definition of education narrows to the intellectual. The child is compartmentalized. He is not seen as a whole person, fully-integrated with physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual capacities. Thus, if an educational program attempts to address the child's intellect while ignoring his spiritual and emotional development, the approach is sadly ignoring the true reality of the child. Likewise, those who separate the spiritual and emotional part of a child from the intellectual make a big mistake. You cannot delegate only the intellectual training of your child to professionals and retain just the spiritual and emotional for yourself. Whatever class is taught, the whole child is affected. — Kevin Swanson

The intellect searches out the Absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God, and without the colors of affection. The intellectual and the active powers seem to succeed each other, and the exclusive activity of the one generates the exclusive activity of the other. There is something unfriendly in each to the other, but they are like the alternate periods of feeding and working in animals; each prepares and will be followed by the other. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The inability of Americans to value intellect is, to me, maddening. If someone possesses physical beauty they will not be cloistered or hidden in dark shadows. No, they are expected to be a source of pleasing scenery to others. We are not frightened in this country by beauty. We celebrate it, as we should. But what about beautiful brains, the kind that create amazing worlds out of nothing but thoughts, that can find a way to intricately bond elements of our lives that common wisdom tells us are inert? Why should anyone hide this intellect ever? No. Fuck boring financiers like Warren Buffett...there is no such thing as unnecessary beauty, physical or intellectual. — Stuart Rojstaczer

History remembers Abe's towering intellect but forgets that, in those days, he was more towering than intellectual. — Seth Grahame-Smith

If you work on yourself intellectually, you will be able to realize your potential — Sunday Adelaja

In every country the intellectual class is the most influential class. This is the class which can foresee advice and lead. In no country does the mass of the people live the life for intelligent thought and action. It is largely imitative and follows the intellectual class. There is no exaggeration in saying that the entire destination of the country depends upon its intellectual class. If the intellectual class is honest and independent, it can be trusted to take the initiative and give a proper lead when a crisis arises. It is true that the intellect by itself is no virtue. It is only a means and the use of a means depends upon the ends which an intellectual person pursues. An intellectual man can be a good man but he may easily be a rogue. Similarly an intellectual class may be a band of high-souled persons, ready to help, ready to emancipate erring humanity or it may easily be a gang of crooks or a body of advocates of narrow clique from which it draws its support. — B.R. Ambedkar

I couldn't stand being identified by my sexuality, I retaliated by insisting that people regard me for my intellectual worth. My intellect became a form of damage control. — Leora Tanenbaum

Fancy, an animal faculty, is very different from imagination, which is intellectual. The former is passive; but the latter is active and creative. Children, the weak minded, and the timid are full of fancy. Men and women of intellect, of great intellect, are alone possessed of great imagination. — Joseph Joubert

Scholars note that human reasoning is limited not only by imperfect information and innate intellectual capacities but also by the broader culture that subsequently shapes the very optics that individuals use to categorize the world. — Michael Barnett

The danger we face does not come from religion. It comes from a growing intellectual bankruptcy that is one of the symptoms of a dying culture. In ancient Rome, as the republic disintegrated and the Caesars were deified, as the Roman Senate became little more than an echo chamber of the emperor, the population's attention was diverted by a series of frontier wars and violent and elaborate spectacles in the arena. The excitement of entertainment consumed ancient Rome's emotional and intellectual life. It poisoned civic and political discourse. Social critics no longer had a form in which to speak. They were answered with ridicule and rage. It was not prerogative of the citizen to think. — Chris Hedges

The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the 'competition' between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of 'exploitation' for which you have damned the strong. — Ayn Rand

There was a time when intellectual meant someone who uses reason and intellect. Today, people who call themselves intellectuals are in a form of mental death spiral: they search for, and find, those index cards that support their world view, and clutch little red books like rosaries in the face of all external evidence. They are ruled by appeals to authority. Their self-image and sense of emotional well-being trumps any and all objective evidence to the contrary. — Bill Whittle

All definitions are a part of the intellectual dissection and compartmentalization of control. — Bryant McGill

I replaced emotional complexity with visual and intellectual complexity. I questioned everything and looked to logic, science, and intellect for answers. — Temple Grandin

Allow intelligent design into science textbooks, lecture halls, and laboratories, and the cost to the frontier of scientific discovery - the frontier that drives the economies of the future - would be incalculable. I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Adams had little experience working with others in a legislative setting, and his obdurate manner and natural impatience did not fully suit him for such an undertaking. Yet, his courtroom skills and his pluck or "pertness," as he referred to it, served him well. Mostly, however, Adams's star rose because of other factors. The very force of his intellect was crucial to his emergence as an important force in Congress. At each step of his ascent, Adams's acuity and his imposing intellectual grasp had impressed others. — John Ferling

The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable - namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man. For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them. — Charles Darwin

Of course, I don't know everything. Considering the infinite amount of knowledge that one could acquire in a virtually innumerable array of intellectual disciplines, it's probably more accurate to say that I don't know anything. — Dean Koontz

Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you - well, of course you have an intellectual expression, and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself an exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. — Oscar Wilde