Intellectual Level Quotes & Sayings

[ ... Dance] involves every possible feeling (as potential), because it is of the body, which is lived (inescapably) as a body of feeling. Some of these feelings we can name, and some we cannot, since we associate feelings with language only when we name them. The body lives sentience on a preverbal level. Dance exists first on this primordial level, not on an intellectual plane (even though it requires skill and intelligence). Its inmost substance cannot be reasoned, only experienced. — Sondra Horton Fraleigh

He explained what he saw in her eyes, which was not sadness or disappointment but understanding. Sympathy, he said, and wit. At some level sympathy implied knowledge and knowledge had a melancholy aspect. He believed that was universally true, no exceptions. When you knew too much you felt a natural distress but that was something quite different from fundamental personal sadness, sadness as a trait, like blue eyes. Her distress was not temperamental but intellectual. — Ward Just

When we are reading we become immersed in stories both on an intellectual and emotional level and when we come back to our own skins, we feel a little changed'. — Peter G. Stromberg

Bill Gates can't control a high-level-energy dog, because his energy is very low, very calm. Very intellectual. A dog doesn't see that as leadership. — Cesar Millan

On a personal level, all of us have to come to terms with the fact that, sooner or later, we will die. And yet today no aspect of human existence, not even the ending of it, is immune to the hegemonic pretensions of neoclassical economic thought. Not only the intellectual poverty, but also the emotional poverty, of what it has to say about death give us little reason to believe that it will be able to face up to the fact of its own mortality. 4. — Jean-Pierre Dupuy

All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those towards whom it is directed will understand it. Therefore, the intellectual level of the propaganda must be lower the larger the number of people who are to be influenced by it. — Adolf Hitler

I've always known, on a purely intellectual level, that our separateness and isolation are an illusion. We're all made of the same thing - the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead stars. — Blake Crouch

The Americans are completely stupid. The intellectual level in any single European country is higher than in America. — Michel Houellebecq

I got to a state where phrases like "the Good, the True, and the Beautiful" filled me with a kind of suppressed indignation, because they stood for the big sin of Platonism: the reduction of all reality to the level of pure abstraction, as if concrete, individual substances had no essential reality of their own, but were only shadows of some remote, universal, ideal essence filed away in a big card-index somewhere in heaven, while the demi-urges milled around the Logos piping their excitement in high, fluted, English intellectual tones. — Thomas Merton

The provincial intellectual is doomed to arguing at low level ... there is still no Australian literary world, not in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide. It is some consolation to realise that there is no literary world in Birmingham or Los Angeles either. I have heard there is one in Montreal, but I don't believe it. The literary world is in London and New York, the only cities big enough to sustain magazines which can afford to reject copy. — Clive James

Self-worth is an understanding on the intellectual level, trusting at the heart level, and accepting at the soul level that you are worthy just because you believe that you are. Your worthiness is proven by your existence. Your breathing. The beating of your heart. Your mere presence is all that is needed to establish your worth. — Iyanla Vanzant

I think prayer may be less about asking for the things we are attached to than it is about relinquishing our attachments in some way. It can take us beyond fear, which is an attachment, and beyond hope, which is another form of attachment. It can help us remember the nature of the world and the nature of life, not on an intellectual level but in a deep and experimental way. When we pray, we don't change the world, we change ourselves. We change our consciousness. We move from an individual, isolated making-things-happen kind of consciousness to a connection on the deepest level with the largest possible reality. — Rachel Naomi Remen

I mean, we're all going to die. We know that on an intellectual level. We figure it out when we're still fairly young, and it scares us so badly that we convince ourselves we're immortal for more than a decade afterwards. — Jim Butcher

Overcoming complacency is crucial at the start of any change process, and it often requires a little bit of surprise, something that grabs attention at more than an intellectual level. You need to surprise people with something that disturbs their view that everything is perfect. — John P. Kotter

Newsmen have a very short attention span. It is a prerequisite in the business. That is why the news accounts of almost anything make sense to all ages up to the age of twelve. If one wishes to enjoy newspapers, it is wise to halt all intellectual development right at that age. The schools are doing their level best to achieve this goal. — John D. MacDonald

America can compete with anyone in the world as long as the playing field is level. China's been cheating over the years. One by holding down the value of their currency. Number two, by stealing our intellectual property; our designs, our patents, our technology. We will have to have people play on a fair basis. — Mitt Romney

The Sunday Tidings, which had for some years been pursing a policy of intellectual sensationalism, had never found it easy to maintain its supply of material. The stuff of mere emotional sensationalism, as used by its cheaper and less dignified contemporaries, lay thickly all around, easily malleable into shapes attractive to the constant human passions. Intellectual sensationalism, however, was a much more tricky business. In addition to avoiding the suggestion of sensationalism for sensationalism's sake, it required knowledge, research, careful timing, and, if possible, some literary ability. Inevitably, therefore, its policy was subject to lamentable gaps during which it could find nothing topical on its chosen level to disclose. — John Wyndham

I suppose I knew on an intellectual level that graves weren't especially made for getting out of. I mean, you start with a hermetically sealed casket and then you dump six feet of dirt on top of it. Over time the earth gets compacted, which can't make it easy to dig through. So even if you're a very angry and determined zombie, you've kind of got your work cut out for you just escaping from the grave.
Which was, I suppose, why we got hit with an initial wave of zombie bugs, birds and rodents. I bet some people would say if you've never picked undead mosquitoes out of your teeth, you've never lived. Under that definition, I'd be just as happy to have not lived, thanks. — C.E. Murphy

Software development takes immense intellectual effort. Even the best programmers can rarely sustain that level of effort for more than a few hours a day. Beyond that, they need to rest their brains a bit, which is why they always seem to be surfing the Internet or playing games when you barge in on them. — Joel Spolsky

The intellectual quest, though fine as pearl or coral, is not the spiritual search. That spiritual search is on another level. Spiritual wine is a different substance. — Rumi

For such people, the ruling gods are progress, science, and development. They imagine that we know so much more about the world than those people of olden times, because "we" have science. Of course, they themselves do not have science, they have simply heard and believed that scientific knowledge is real knowledge. They know little about the goals and methods of science, and nothing about the Islamic Intellectual tradition. They are blind imitators in intellectual issues, that is, on the level where they should be striving for their own understanding. What is worse, this is a selective imitation, since they only accept the authority of the "scientists" and the "experts", not that of the great Muslim thinkers of the past. If Einstein said it, it must be true, but if Al-Ghazali or Mulla Sadra said it, then it can't be true, because it isn't scientific. — William C. Chittick

There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead. And all of us, even liberals like myself, are poorer for it. — Mark Lilla

Helping children at a level of genuine intellectual inquiry takes imagination on the part of the adult. Even more, it takes the courage to become a resource in unfamiliar areas of knowledge and in ones for which one has no taste. But parents, no less than teachers, must respect a child's mind and not exploit it for their own vanity or ambition, or to soothe their own anxiety. — Dorothy H Cohen

If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable. You must reach the emotional and intellectual level of ability where you can go out stark naked, emotionally, in front of an audience. — Jack Lemmon

You can't relate to an absolute or it wouldn't be absolute, it would be relative. On an intellectual level, that's easy. However, you hear theologians in the theistic traditions talk about absolute God, and I saw God, or God spoke; speaking, being seen, these are all relational things. So what is absolute about such a being, wouldn't actually be absolute. — Robert Thurman

There is a great tendency today to want everybody to write just the way everybody else does, to see and to show the same things in the same way to the same middling audience. But the writer, in order best to use the talents he has been given, has to write at his own intellectual level. For him to do anything else is to bury his talents. This doesn't mean that, within his limitations, he shouldn't try to reach as many people as possible, but it does mean that he must not lower his standards to do so. — Flannery O'Connor

Moreover, even at elite colleges, the personnel attracted to college admissions are seldom themselves part of the intellectual elite. Yet their job is to select students unlike themselves, to be taught by professors unlike themselves, for careers unlike theirs. It can hardly be surprising that admissions personnel are drawn toward non-intellectual criteria and toward ideas not unlike the notion of judging "the whole person," as found among educators at the pre-college level. Over the years, all sorts of criteria from popular psychology and sociological speculation have assumed increasing weight visa-vis such standard intellectual criteria as academic records and test scores. The — Thomas Sowell

Prayer is not a way to get what we want to happen, like the remote control that comes with the television set. I think that prayer may be less about asking for the things we are attached to than it is about relinquishing our attachments in some way. It can take us beyond fear, which is an attachment, and beyond hope, which is another form of attachment. It can help us remember the nature of the world and the nature of life, not on an intellectual level but in a deep and experiential way. When we pray, we don't change the world, we change ourselves. We change our consciousness. — Rachel Naomi Remen

It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual. — Ian McEwan

For original ideas to come about, you have to let them percolate under the level of consciousness in a place where we have no way to make them obey our own desires or our own direction. Their random combinations are driven by forces we don't know about. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I'm not mean to everybody. I'm only mean to people whose intellectual level is awfully lower than mine. — Alexandra Engellmann

One of the biggest problems with people who think that they are smart is that they believe that the number of times they admit that they are wrong is inversely proportional to their
intellectual level. — Daniel Willey

Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it's not the destination, it's the journeyto get there. It's a way of thinking and it's an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it. I think once we stop asking questions like "what is the age of the universe," or "how are the instructions of DNA carried out on a microscopic level," once we stop asking questions like that, we're dead. — Alan Lightman

The artist must operate on the assumption that the public consists in the highest order of individual; that he is civilized, cultured, and highly sensitive both to emotional and intellectual contexts. And while the whole public most certainly does not consist in that sort of individual, still the tendency of art is to create such a public - to lift the level of perceptivity, to increase and enrich the average individual's store of values ... I believe that it is in a certain devotion to concepts of truth that we discover values. — Ben Shahn

Well, I do think, particularly the way I work, the better images occur when you're moving to the fringes of your own understanding. That's where self-doubt and risk taking are likely to occur. It's when you trust what's happening at a non-intellectual non-conscious level that you can produce work that later resonates, often in a way that you can't articulate a response to. — Jerry Uelsmann

A man described by authorities as one evolutionary step above a banana slug has recently admitted to having been locked in the Sacajawea Junior High biology lab over a long weekend nearly sixteen years ago when he fell asleep and was mistaken as a cadaver. Though the man is incapable of human speech, he was able, over a period of weeks, to chisel out his story in hieroglyphics on the bathroom wall of the insane asylum where he now resides. He claims that toward the end of the second day of his accidental captivity, he got downright lonely and sought companionship at his own intellectual level. He found that companionship in a petri dish. — Chris Crutcher

Man in the mass sinks unconsciously to an inferior moral and intellectual level, to that level which is always there, below the threshold of consciousness, ready to break forth as soon as it is activated by the formation of a mass.
...
Since nobody is capable of recognizing just where and how much he himself is possessed and unconscious, he simply projects his own condition upon his neighbor, and thus it becomes a sacred duty to have the biggest guns and the most poisonous gas. — C. G. Jung

It is wonderful to work in an environment with a lot of smart people. It challenges you to think and work on a different level. If you play with better players, you learn a lot: perspectives, intellectual arguments, new ways of thinking about things. — Marissa Mayer

The great mistake of contemporary life is that we have made such a virtue of intellectual growth while almost totally ignoring the necessity of conscience growth. We have failed to understand that individual evolution can take place not only in mental but in moral power. The earth tragically today is full of people who remain fixated on a childish level of conscience. What an illusion has blinded the human race: that our conscience is given to us once and for all at birth and we ourselves have to do little or nothing about it ... The truth is that our moral capacity is purely potential and needs strenuous training, education and development. It is certainly not an organic power that comes to us at birth, like breathing, which demands little attention from us as long as we live ... A revolution has to take place in our thinking about morality. We have to become as sensitive about being moral morons as we are now anxious about being intellectual idiots. — Joshua Loth Liebman

Only after making intelligent and thorough use of his human powers had he trusted himself to the divine will, thereby clarifying for us the meaning of at-tawakkul ala Allah (reliance on God, trusting oneself to God): responsibly exercising all the qualities (intellectual, spiritual, psychological, sentimental, etc.) each one of us has been granted and humbly remembering that beyond what is humanly possible, God alone makes things happen. Indeed, this teaching is the exact opposite of the temptation of fatalism: God will act only after humans have, at their own level, sought out and exhausted all the potentialities of action. That is the profound meaning of this Quranic verse: "Verily never will God change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves."1 — Tariq Ramadan

Not all deceptions are palatable. Untruths are too easy to come by, too quickly exploded, too cheap and ephemeral to give lasting comfort. Mundus vult decipi, but there is a hierarchy of deceptions.
Near the bottom of the ladder is journalism: a steady stream of irresponsible distortions that most people find refreshing although on the morning after, or at least within a week, it will be stale and flat.
On a higher level we find fictions that men eagerly believe, regardless of the evidence, because they gratify some wish.
Near the top of the ladder we encounter curious mixtures of untruth and truth that exert a lasting fascination on the intellectual community. — Walter Kaufmann

Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought. — Susan Sontag

The intellectual who wants to do her work properly must today go back to the starting point: the woman whom she knows, and first of all to herself. It is at that level, and at no other, that she ought to begin to think about the world situation. — Jacques Ellul

In the end, there's something of the puritan work ethic about me that roles really must sustain me on an intellectual level. — Damian Lewis

All fiction, if it's successful, is going to appeal to the emotions. Emotion is really what fiction is all about. That's not to say fiction can't be thoughtful, or present some interesting or provocative ideas to make us think. But if you want to present an intellectual argument, nonfiction is a better tool. You can drive a nail with a shoe but a hammer is a better tool for that. But fiction is about emotional resonance, about making us feel things on a primal and visceral level. — George R R Martin

There was just something about her dying that I had understood but not really understood, if you know what I mean. I mean, you can know someone is dying on an intellectual level, but emotionally it hasn't really hit you, and then when it does, that's when you feel like shit. — Jesse Andrews

I try to understand place on a deeper level than just the physical or environmental aspects. It includes cultural and intellectual forces, too. It's an inclusive approach that brings in many disciplines and sees place as a dynamic thing. — Antoine Predock

I think one of the important evolutions is that we no longer feel compulsively the need to argue, or to justify things on a kind of rational level. We are much more willing to admit that certain things are completely instinctive and others are really intellectual. — Rem Koolhaas

I think there are a lot of similarities between writing and music. Music is much more direct and much more emotional and that's the level I want to be at when I'm writing. Writing is much more intellectual and indirect and abstract, in a way. — Karl Ove Knausgard

The people who defend their initial reactions the most are highly-confident, educated people. If a smart person has a strong initial reaction to something, it is very difficult for him to change his mind. Why? He feels that he is smart, which gives him confidence in his choices. Instead of doubting himself, he will defend his position, possibly with a compelling argument. A person who is not as confident in his intellectual ability will not have the same confidence level and will keep more of an open mind. The person with less confidence thinks he has something to learn, whereas the person with hubris thinks he has something to teach. — Michael Angelo Costa

Nothing threatens freedom of the personality and the meaning of life like war, poverty, terror. But there are also indirect and only slightly more remote dangers. One of these is the stupefaction of man (the "gray mass," to use the cynical term of bourgeois prognosticators) by mass culture with its intentional or commercially motivated lowering of intellectual level and content, with its stress on entertainment or utilitarianism, and with its carefully protective censorship. — Andrei Sakharov

I'm a storyteller. I feel like the issue of discourse is an important one because there's a lot of political and ideological discourse that goes around, and we relate to that on an intellectual level. — Ayad Akhtar

Totally agree! The fiction reading process is basically a human communication on an emotional, intellectual and spiritual level between reader and writer, transcending space, time, cultures, societies and religions, through the medium of the narrative and characters. Language matters in the sense of aesthetics and embellishment, but not in a rigid scientific way. — Alice Poon

We need not deplore the renunciation of historical truth when we put forward rational grounds for the precepts of civilization. The truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of humanity cannot recognize them as truth. The case is similar to what happens when we tell a child that new-born babies are brought by the stork. Here, too, we are telling the truth in symbolic clothing, for we know what the large bird signifies . But the child does not know it. He hears only the distorted part of what we say, and feels that he has been deceived; and we know how often his distrust of the grown-ups and his refractoriness actually take their start from this impression. We have become convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth in what we tell children and not to withhold from them a knowledge of the true state of affairs commensurate with their intellectual level. — Sigmund Freud

The Communist Manifesto condemned the bourgeoisie not only for pauperizing, dehumanizing, and enslaving the toiling masses, but also for robbing the intellectual of his elevated status. "The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe." Though the movement was initiated by intellectuals and powered by their talents and hungers, it yet held up the proletariat as the chosen people - the only carrier of the revolutionary idea, and the chief beneficiary of the revolution to come. The intellectuals, particularly those who had "raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole," were to act as guides - as a composite Moses - during the long wanderings in the desert. Like Moses, the intellectuals would have no more to do once the promised land was in sight. "The role of the intelligentsia," said Lenin, "is to make special leaders from among the intelligentsia unnecessary. — Eric Hoffer

Intellectual culture seems to separate high art from low art. Low art is horror or pornography or anything that has a physical component to it and engages the reader on a visceral level and evokes a strong sympathetic reaction. High art is people driving in Volvos and talking a lot. I just don't want to keep those things separate. I think you can use visceral physical experiences to illustrate larger ideas, whether they're emotional or spiritual. I'm trying to not exclude high and low art or separate them. — Chuck Palahniuk

I am a political animal, because for God's sakes I think "We The People" is a job. I think experienced self government demands on all levels - intellectual, moral, historical, and spiritual level. We are supposed to be engaged and give directions to our elected employees. — Ted Nugent

My uncle said physically disciplining children fell into the same category as hitting an animal, neither has the emotional or intellectual capacity to understand the action on any level other than pain and fear. He said discipline is a concept that can only be understood by adults. — Fabian Black

If you don't set your writing - teaching - at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop their intellectual muscle. — M.H. Abrams

We are in a maze which we built, and then we fell into, now can't get out. To make the game into something real, something more than merely an intellectual exercise, we elected to lose our exceptional faculties, to reduce us an entire level. This unfortunately, includes a loss of memory. — Philip K. Dick

Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level. — A. N. Wilson

Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material improvement. Knowledge is a viaticum. Though is a prime necessity; truth is nourishment, like wheat. A reasoning faculty, deprived of knowledge and wisdom, pines away. We should feel the same pity for minds that do not eat as for stomachs. If there be anything sadder than a body perishing for want of bread, it is a mind dying of hunger for lack of light. All progress tends toward the solution. Some day, people will be amazed. As the human race ascends, the deepest layers will naturally emerge from the zone of distress. The effacement of wretchedness will be effected by a simple elevation level. — Victor Hugo

If we define 'thought collective' as a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction, we will find by implication that it also provides the special 'carrier' for the historical development of any field of thought, as well as for the given stock of knowledge and level of culture. This we have designated thought style. — Ludwik Fleck

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. — Adolf Hitler

I am not looking for a "perfect" man. Only one who matches me on an emotional, spiritual, sexual, and intellectual level. — Amanda Mosher

McDougall does not dispute the thesis as to
the collective inhibition of intelligence in groups
(p. 41). He says that the minds of lower intelligence
bring down those of a higher order to their own
level. The latter are obstructed in their activity,
because in general an intensification of emotion
creates unfavourable conditions for sound intellectual
work, and further because the individuals are intimidated
by the group and their mental activity is
not free, and because there is a lowering in each
individual of his sense of responsibility for his own
performances. — Sigmund Freud

John Connally's conversion to the GOP raised the intellectual level of both parties. — Frank Mankiewicz

The general intellectual level of South Florida is somewhere just above "functionally retarded". — Tucker Max

Language is deeply entwined in the intellectual development of humanity itself, it accompanies the latter upon every step of its localized progression or regression; moreover, the pertinent cultural level in each case is recognizable in it ... Language is, as it were, the external manifestation of the minds of peoples. Their language is their soul, and their soul is their language. It is impossible to conceive them ever sufficiently identical ... The creation of language is an innate necessity of humanity. It is not a mere external vehicle, designed to sustain social intercourse, but an indispensable factor for the development of human intellectual powers, culminating in the formulation of philosophical doctrine. — Wilhelm Von Humboldt

Life at university, with its intellectual and inconclusive discussions at a postgraduate level is on the whole a bad training for the real world. Only men of very strong character surmount this handicap. — Paul Chambers

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

The theoretically unrestricted right to develop power, to wage war against other states, is antisocial and is doubly dangerous, because the state as a mass entity represents a low moral and intellectual level. — Christian Lous Lange

State integration involves linkage in at least three different dimensions of our lives. The first level of integration is between our different states - the "inter" dimension. We must accept our multiplicity, the fact that we can show up quite differently in our athletic, intellectual, sexual, spiritual - or many other - states. A heterogeneous collection of states is completely normal in us humans. The key to well-being is collaboration across states, not some rigidly homogeneous unity. The notion that we can have a single, totally consistent way of being is both idealistic and unhealthy. — Daniel J. Siegel

Mates are a waste of fucking time. They are always ready to drag you down tae their level of social, sexual and intellectual mediocrity. — Irvine Welsh

For me, the ultimate form of expression is blues, where jazz appeals to me on an intellectual level. — Scott Henderson

In the earliest times of the discovery of the faculty of judgment, every new judgment was a find. The worth of this find rose, the more practical and fertile the judgment was. Verdicts which now seem to us very common then still demanded an unusual level of intellectual life. One had to bring genius and acuity together in order to find new relations using the new tool. Its application to the most characteristic, interesting, and general aspects of humanity necessarily aroused exceptional admiration and drew the attention of all good minds to itself. In this way those bodies of proverbial sayings came into being that have been valued so highly at all times and among all peoples. It would easily be possible for the discoveries of genius we make today to meet with a similar fate in the course of time. There could easily come a time when all that would be as common as moral precepts are now, and new, more sublime discoveries would occupy the restless spirit of men. — Novalis

Standardisation of intellectual and emotional patterns had become extreme. A main mechanism for achieving this was a device that supplied identical indoctrinational material simultaneously into every living or working unit, whether that of a single person, a family, or an institution, through a whole country. These programmes were standardised, particularly for children. At best they reinforced a low level of ethic - kindness to animals, for instance - but the worst was inherent in the sheer fact of the infinite repetition. — Doris Lessing

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

The work environment is very important in determining how enjoyable work is. It is very important to work with smart guys who have a superior level of intellectual bandwidth and still have softer skills as well. — Kumar Mangalam Birla

Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step behind, and thus causes a fall in the political-maturity thermometer. It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a people's level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilization. — Arthur Koestler

You should leave your wife more time." "She has all day available." "I'm not kidding. If you don't, you're guilty not only on a human level but also on a political one." "What's the crime?" "The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women's intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn't realize it." I waited in silence for Pietro to respond. My husband reacted with sarcasm. "Elena can cultivate her intelligence when and how she likes, the essential thing is that she not take time from me." "If she doesn't take it from you, then who can she take it from?" Pietro frowned. "When the task we give ourselves has the urgency of passion, there's nothing that can keep us from completing it." I felt wounded, I whispered with a false smile: "My husband is saying that I have no true interest. — Elena Ferrante

How much more so when it comes to the deep truths of the Christian faith. God loves you; you matter to him. That is a fact, stated as a proposition. I imagine most of you have heard it any number of times. Why, then, aren't we the happiest people on earth? It hasn't reached our hearts. Facts stay lodged in the mind, for the most part. They don't speak at the level we need to hear. Proposition speaks to the mind, but when you tell a story, you speak to the heart. We've been telling each other stories since the beginning of time. It is our way of communicating the timeless truths, passing them down. And that's why when Jesus comes to town, he speaks in a way that will get past all our intellectual defenses and disarm our hearts. He tells a certain kind of story. — John Eldredge

Everybody's going to approach a character differently, depending upon what they bring to it on their own intellectual level or their feelings from their heart and soul. — Peter Cullen

Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in its struggle to become free of the social level, has ignored the social level's role in keeping the biological level under control. — Robert M. Pirsig

The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation. I grapple with this because I'm a parent. And I think anybody who has children, you come to this realization, you know - what'll it be? Alienated, cynical intellectual? Or slack-jawed, half-wit consumer of the horseshit being handed down from on high? There is not much choice in there, you see. And we all want our children to be well adjusted; unfortunately, there's nothing to be well adjusted to! — Terence McKenna