Intellectual Life Quotes & Sayings

The pointless ferocities of intellectual life shock businessmen, who kill only to eat. — Mason Cooley

American culture has regressed because of contemporary society's glorification of making a good living and spending free time in media activities rather than constantly devoting themselves to a learning and self-improvement. The combination of grooming youngsters to fit into a commercial workplace and Americans willingness to submit themselves to endless hours of watching television shows filled with murders, violence, sex, and replete with advertisements that promote the goods of commercial giants has eroded the American spirit and contributed to lack of an intellectually sophisticated populous. — Kilroy J. Oldster

A bicycle journey through life enhances a person's body, mind and spirit. Each encounter creates an opening for intellectual growth. A bicycle journey promotes exceptional fitness. Two-wheeled travel offers spiritual lifts in ways unexplainable. On a bicycle, you know you live on the edge, at the peak and into the thrust of life. You live it because you choose it. Or, it chooses you and you accept the opportunity. Thus, you command your life." Frosty Wooldridge-- Bicycling Around the World--Tire Tracks for Your Imagination — Frosty Wooldridge

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

The truth is: Everyone will judge you. But this depends upon your intellectual capacity whether you are able to distinguish constructive criticism between an insult coming from other people's opinions about you. — Anonymous

Intellectual knowledge exists in and of the brain.
Because the brain is part of the body, which must one day expire, this collection of facts, however large and impressive, will expire as well.
Insight, however, is a function of the spirit.
Because your spirit follows you through cycle after cycle of life, death, and rebirth, you have the opportunity of cultivating insight in an ongoing fashion.
Refined over time, insight becomes pure, constant, and unwavering.
This is the beginning of immortality. — Lao-Tzu

All of our life is but a mass of small habits - practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual - that bear us irresistibly toward our destiny. — William James

Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians. — Sarah Moore Grimke

O God, teach me to be satisfied with my own helplessness in the spiritual life. Teach me to be content with Your grace that comes to me in darkness and that works things I cannot see. Teach me to be happy that I can depend on You. To depend on You should be enough for an eternity of joy. To depend on You by itself ought to be infinitely greater than any joy which my own intellectual appetite could desire. — Thomas Merton

I didn't get a high school diploma. I really didn't have much of an education, which left me open to educating myself throughout my life, without the limitations on intellectual curiosity a formal education can impose. I followed what interested me. — Elayne Boosler

I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published and was given the time and space to work, but someone who wrote as a course of life. Maybe writing wouldn't have any rewards. Maybe the salvation I would gain through work would only be emotional and intellectual. Wouldn't that be enough, to be a waitress who found an hour or two hidden in every day to write? — Ann Patchett

The word philosophy simply means a pursuit of wisdom, the purpose of life, and a search for Truth. However, this quest, because it originates with man, can never find the answers. In fact, man cannot reach God or know God by intellectual pursuit. — Jimmy Swaggart

I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescalin or of any other drug, prepared or in the future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life: Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I am suggesting is that the mescalin experience is what Catholic theologians call "a gratuitous grace," not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large - this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual. — Aldous Huxley

To seek enlightenment, intellectual or spiritual; to do good; to love and be loved; to create and to teach: these are the highest purposes of humankind. If there is meaning in life, it lies here. — George Monbiot

Despair is the state in which anxiety and restlessness are immanent to existence. Nobody in despair suffers from "problems", but from his own inner torment and fire. It's a pity that nothing can be solved in this world. Yet there never was and here never will be anyone who would commit suicide for this reason. So much for the power that intellectual anxiety has over the total anxiety of our being! That is why I prefer the dramatic life, consumed by inner fires and tortured by destiny, to the intellectual, caught up in abstractions which do not engage the essence of our subjectivity. I despise the absence of risks, madness and passion in abstract thinking. How fertile live, passionate thinking is! Lyricism feeds it like blood pumped into the heart! — Emil M. Cioran

I think what drives scientists is this tremendous intellectual adventure - pushing the boundaries of knowledge, walking down a track that nobody has walked down before, not knowing what's around the corner and then seeing a landscape that is so extraordinarily beautiful and complex, being part of the community that is driving the boundaries of knowledge and giving us insight into the amazing process of life. — Suzanne Cory

One of the wonderful things about Internet is it's like a salon. It brings people together from different intellectual walks of life. — Eric Kandel

Plain intellectual thinking is the peak of ignorance because all that you will know is to play with a few aspects and make others look like fools. — Jaggi Vasudev

Marriage is a linchpin in many women's lives, but many other things can create a satisfying life. I adore my career. It stretches every physical, emotional, and intellectual muscle I have. — Geraldine Stutz

I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels are not content. Nor are they are a mirror to life or an explanation of life or a guide to life. Novels are life, or they are nothing. — Richard Flanagan

You have to become that infinite formless creation, which is life, to know it. It cannot be known in an intellectual sense. That is enlightenment. — Frederick Lenz

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

In our contemporary social and intellectual plight, it is nothing less than shocking to discover that those persons who claim to have discovered an absolute are usually the same people who also pretend to be superior to the rest. To find people in our day attempting to pass off to the world and recommending to others some nostrum of the absolute which they claim to have discovered is merely a sign of the loss of and the need for intellectual and moral certainty, felt by broad sections of the population who are unable to look life in the face. — Karl Mannheim

Healing requires far more of us than just the participation of our intellectual and even our emotional resources. And it certainly demands that we do more than look backwards at the dead-end archives of our past. Healing is, by definition, taking a process of disintegration of life and transforming into a process of return to life. — Caroline Myss

To us to-day this period of transition, with its mediaeval mixture of commerce, religion, and war, of emotion and logic, of admiration for St. Augustine and belief in the infallibility of Aristotle, looks extremely odd. We forget that our generation may be in danger of similar criticism. Odd or not, this was the state of Italy in the period preceding that great burst of the arts and intellectual life known as the Renaissance. FOOTNOTES: — Henry Dwight Sedgwick

For a good part of my life, I had a share in this idea that I have not yet quite abandoned. But there came a time when I could not protect myself, and indeed did not wish to protect myself, from the onslaught of reality. Marxism, I conceded, had its intellectual and philosophical and ethical glories, but they were in the past. Something of the heroic period might perhaps be retained, but the fact had to be faced: there was no longer any guide to the future. In addition, the very concept of a total solution had led to the most appalling human sacrifices, and to the invention of excuses for them. Those of us who had sought a rational alternative to religion had reached a terminus that was comparably dogmatic. What else was to be expected of something that was produced by the close cousins of chimpanzees? Infallibility? Thus, dear reader, if you have come this far and found your own faith undermined - as I hope - I am willing to say that to some extent I know what you are going through. — Christopher Hitchens

Plato's concern is not just an intellectual issue, but it is knitted with emotional life as well. — Rebecca Goldstein

The life of a visual communicator should be one of systematic and exciting intellectual chaos. — Alberto Cairo

The least step forward in the domain of free thought and individual life has been achieved in all ages to the accompaniment of physical and intellectual tortures: and not only the mere step forward, no! but every form of movement and change has rendered necessary innumerable martyrs, throughout the entire course of thousands of years which sought their paths and laid down their foundation-stones, years, however, which we do not think of when we speak about "world-history," that ridiculously small division of mankind's existence. And even in this so-called world-history, which in the main is merely a great deal of noise about the latest novelties, there is no more important theme than the old, old tragedy of the martyrs who tried to move the mire. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Ordinary philosophy is like a hound hunting his own tail. The more he hunts the farther he has to go, and his nose never catches up with his heels, because it is forever ahead of them. So the present is already a foregone conclusion, and I am ever too late to understand it...The truth is that we travel on a journey that was accomplished before we set out; and the real end of philosophy is accomplished, not when we arrive at, but when we remain in, our destination (being already there) - which may occur vicariously in this life when we cease our intellectual questioning — Benjamin Paul Blood

He swore by all that he ever had loved and reverenced that he would try, try with all his might in the short time that might remain to him ... he would forget himself, he would put his own pain and chagrin and disappointment, his own feeling of defeat and uselessness, his own craving for love and intellectual companionship in the background, and he would see if the more than six feet of bone and muscle that contained his being could do any small service that might come his way for God and his fellow man before he went. Maybe if he could accomplish some little thing, something that would ease the ache of even one heart that ached as his was aching at that minute, just maybe that knowledge would be the secret that he might carry in his breast that would set the stamp of an indelible smile on his face, so that even a child could discern the majesty of the impulse and he would not be ashamed when the end came. — Gene Stratton-Porter

If women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined lack of access to the modes of intellectual debate by the invocation of hypothetical great goddesses, they are simply flattering themselves into submission (a technique often used on them by men). All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciliatory mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place. — Angela Carter

Wisdom is the most-sought intellectual degree whose subjects are regularly learned throughout life with an open mind in an open university called life and taught by a teacher who is none other than self-experience only. — Anuj

Anarchism is a definite intellectual current in the life of our times, whose adherents advocate the abolition of economic monopolies and of all political and social coercive institutions within society. In place of the present capitalistic economic order Anarchists would have a free association of all productive forces based upon co-operative labour, which would have as its sole purpose the satisfying of the necessary requirements of every member of society, and would no longer have in view the special interest of privileged minorities within the social union. — Rudolf Rocker

Scientific reason, with its strict conscience, its lack of prejudice, and its determination to question every result again the moment it might lead to the least intellectual advantage, does in an area of secondary interest what we ought to be doing with the basic questions of life. — Robert Musil

I need a challenge. I need the intellectual stimulation. I'm a member of a community on each film, working in concert to try to bring an idea to life. It's a great job. — Harrison Ford

I'd grown up in a Presbyterian church, but I really didn't know Christ personally in my heart. I knew him, but I didn't know him. And there's a difference between an intellectual faith and a personal, heart faith in which I opened my heart to him and let him rule my life. — Billy Graham

Many French people were difficult conversationalists. Asking them not only where they were originally from but what they did in life was considered rude - I suppose because many of them did nothing (many Parisians are rentiers, people who live off the rents of their properties) or because they weren't proud of their jobs, which simultaneously supported and interfered with their intellectual and artistic passions. — Edmund White

SETH: But don't you understand, Amy? You're wrong. Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person - sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of those things. Three - that's it. Maybe four, if you're very lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all of those things. But this isn't the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That's real life. Don't you see it's a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing. — Hanya Yanagihara

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age ... The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy,intellectual daring; I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colour of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder ... I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram. — Oscar Wilde

Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste. — Terence McKenna

I am a degenerate modern semi-intellectual who would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my New Statesman every Friday. Clearly I do not, in a sense, 'want' to return to a simpler, harder, probably agricultural way of life. In the same sense I don't 'want' to cut down on my drinking, to pay my debts, to take enough exercise, to be faithful to my wife, etc. etc. But in another and more permanent sense I do want these things, and perhaps in the same sense I want a civilization in which 'progress' is not definable as making the world safe for little fat men. — George Orwell

I have spent a good part of my life showing what an intellectual bubble the Left lives in. — Dennis Prager

Writing was the solution to every problem - financial, emotional, intellectual. It had kept me company when I was a lonely child. It gave me an excuse to go places I would otherwise be unlikely to venture. It satisfied the edict my mother had issued many times throughout my life: "You have to make your own living; you never want to be dependent on a man. — Ariel Levy

Isn't it distinctly to be seen in the development of each philosopher's theory, that he knows what is the chief significance of life beforehand, just as positively as the peasant Fyodor, and not a bit more clearly than he, and is simply trying by a dubious intellectual path to come back to what everyone knows? — Leo Tolstoy

There will always be those little minds who, out of vanity or intellectual display, will attempt to destroy faith in the very foundations of life. — Ezra Taft Benson

I led the life of an intellectual up until a certain age. I remember Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams' was a big favorite when I was 11. It sounded so interesting. And it really was! — Wallace Shawn

Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization. — G. M. Trevelyan

[D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few. — John Adams

But I must hope that books possess a life of a more varied kind than their authors' myopia concedes to them. A book is a kind of of machine which the reader can freely use as a generator of intellectual stimulation. It is enough that the book should be truly a machine for thinking, that it should generate a variety of possible conclusions without its author's ordaining and limiting them in advance. — Umberto Eco

What is freedom?
Is it moving through a room unhindered, in any direction you want, fast or slow? Or is it being able to think any thought whatsoever, high or low, without shame or fear? Is freedom being able to openly express your convictions, and then trying to influence others to think the same thing? Or is freedom having the possibility to choose, being able to say no to what you don't want?
[...]
Freedom, thought Phillip Mouse, would be to outwit the limitations fate had once given him. To break out of the social, intellectual, and emotional framework that the factory [birthplace] and his youth had defined.
Freedom, thought Mouse, was to surprise life by placing yourself above your fate. — Tim Davys

The woman who refuses to see her sexual organs as mere wood chips, designed to make the man's life more comfortable, is in danger of becoming a lesbian
an active, phallic woman, an intellectual virago with a fire of her own ... The lesbian body is a particularly pernicious and depraved version of the female body in general; it is susceptible to auto-eroticism, clitoral pleasure and self-actualization. — Sigmund Freud

Psychical life is neither unity nor multiplicity, that it transcends both the mechanical and the intellectual, mechanism and finalism having meaning only where there is "distinct multiplicity," "spatiality," and consequently assemblage of pre-existing parts: "real duration" signifies both undivided continuity and creation. — Henri Bergson

Reason flows from the blending of rational thought and feeling. If the two functions are torn apart, thinking deteriorates into schizoid intellectual activity and feeling deteriorates into neurotic life-damaging passions. — Erich Fromm

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

Most of the books I have are indicators of my insecurity. I really wanted to be an intellectual. I really wanted to understand Sartre. I thought that was what made people smart. I have tried to read Being and Nothingness no fewer than twenty times in my life. I really thought that every answer had to be in that book. Maybe it is. The truth is, I can't read anything with any distance. Every book is a self-help book to me. Just having them makes me feel better. I underline profusely but I don't retain much. Reading is like a drug. When I am reading from these books it feels like I am thinking what is being read, and that gives me a rush. That is enough. I glean what I can. I finish some of the unfinished thoughts lingering around in my head by adding the thoughts of geniuses and I build from there. There are bookmarks in most of the denser tomes at around page 20 to 40 because that was where I said, "I get it." Then I put them back on the shelf. — Marc Maron

The isolated man does not develop any intellectual power. It is necessary for him to be immersed in an environment of other men, whose techniques he absorbs during the first twenty years of his life. He may then perhaps do a little research of his own and make a very few discoveries which are passed on to other men. From this point of view the search for new techniques must be regarded as carried out by the human community as a whole, rather than by individuals. — Alan Turing

Our slower pace of life, our thoughtfulness, our spiritual and intellectual depth, and our listening abilities are prophetic qualities for the evangelical community, calling us to a renewed understanding of God and a fresh reading on the abundant life Jesus came to give us. Yet because of the extroverted bias in many of our churches, introverts are leading double lives. We are masquerading as extroverts in order to find acceptance, yet we feel displaced and confused. We are weary of fighting our introversion, and we long to live faithfully as the people we were created to be. — Adam S. McHugh

Intellectual life requires for its expansion and manifestation the influences and assimilation of the interests and affections of others. — Jane Addams

Whoever prefers the material comforts of life over intellectual wealth is like the owner of a palace who moves into the servants' quarters and leaves the sumptuous rooms empty. — Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina. — Pat Conroy

Based on our badly borrowed misunderstanding of the words 'secular' and 'spiritual' we seem
to have become blinded by the dominant intellectual ideology of our times, according to which schools as secular organizations are supposed to not have anything to do with matters of the spirit. Education has, therefore, become concerned only with matters of material life (eventually leading to commodification)... This dichotomy between 'education for social success' and education for spirit' must go if we want to make Indian Education more relevant for the future of India. Education needs to become more integral, more complete through a meaningful synthesis of the two. — Beloo Mehra

There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but what a marvelous one. Better than G.B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore, scraping the mind and the sensibilities. It was good to read them all though. It made you realize that thoughts and words could be fascinating, if finally useless. — Charles Bukowski

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.

The heart symbolizes the center of our moral, spiritual, and intellectual life. It is the seat of our conscience and life. — Billy Graham

The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes. — William James

I am passionate about everything in my life
first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that's a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I'm a woman, but because it's such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society.
bell hooks — Bell Hooks

The liberal professions, and in a wider sense the well-to-do classes, are certainly those with the liveliest taste for knowledge and the most active intellectual life. — Emile Durkheim

Life is essentially a series of events to be lived through rather than intellectual riddles to be played with and solved. — George Arthur Buttrick

From the beginning, of course, I had known that the pure forcefulness of my argument would not penetrate deep enough to effect any change. It almost never does. It's never worked for me when I've been in therapy. Only when one feels an insight in one's bones does one own it. Only then can one act on it and change. Pop psychologists forever talk about "responsibility assumption," but it's all words: it is extraordinarily hard, even terrifying, to own the insight that you and only you construct your own life design. Thus, the problem in therapy is always how to move from an ineffectual intellectual appreciation of a truth about oneself to some emotional experience of it. It is only when therapy enlists deep emotions that it becomes a powerful force for change. And powerlessness was — Irvin D. Yalom

I wish [that when] I was 12 years old I'd been able to watch a video of my favourite actress explaining in such an intellectual, beautiful, poignant way the definition of feminism - I would have understood it and then earlier on in my life I would have proudly claimed that I was a feminist, because I would have understood what the word means. — Taylor Swift

There is something stunningly narrow about how the Anthropic Principle is phrased. Yes, only certain laws and constants of nature are consistent with our kind of life. But essentially the same laws and constants are required to make a rock. So why not talk about a Universe designed so rocks could one day come to be, and strong and weak Lithic Principles? If stones could philosophize, I imagine Lithic Principles would be at the intellectual frontiers. — Carl Sagan

What is remarkable in Burke's first performance," wrote his great nineteenth-century biographer John Morley, "is his discernment of the important fact that behind the intellectual disturbances in the sphere of philosophy, and the noisier agitations in the sphere of theology, there silently stalked a force that might shake the whole fabric of civil society itself."4 A caustic and simplistic skepticism of all traditional institutions, supposedly grounded in a scientific rationality that took nothing for granted but in fact willfully ignored the true complexity of social life, seemed to Burke poorly suited for the study of society, and even dangerous when applied to it. Burke would warn of, and contend with, this force for the rest of his life. — Yuval Levin

This body is the boat which will carry us to the other shore of the ocean of life. It must be taken care of. Unhealthy persons cannot be Yogis. Mental laziness makes us lose all lively interest in the subject, without which there will neither be the will nor the energy to practise. Doubts will arise in the mind about the truth of the science, however strong one's intellectual conviction may be, until certain peculiar psychic experiences come, as hearing or seeing at a distance, etc. These glimpses strengthen the mind and make the student persevere. Falling away ... when obtained. Some days or weeks when you are practicing, the mind will be calm and easily concentrated, and you will find yourself progressing fast. All of a sudden the progress will stop one day, and you will find yourself, as it were, stranded. Persevere. All progress proceeds by such rise and fall. — Swami Vivekananda

The motives behind scientism are culturally significant. They have been mixed, as usual: genuine curiosity in search of truth; the rage for certainty and for unity; and the snobbish desire to earn the label scientist when that became a high social and intellectual rank. But these efforts, even though vain, have not been without harm, to the inventors and to the world at large. The "findings" have inspired policies affecting daily life that were enforced with the same absolute assurance as earlier ones based on religion. At the same time, the workers in the realm of intuition, the gifted finessers - artists, moralists, philosophers, historians, political theorists, and theologians - were either diverted from their proper task, while others were looking on them with disdain as dabblers in the suburbs of Truth. — Jacques Barzun

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

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

The world of shapes, lines, curves, and solids is as varied as the world of numbers, and it is only our long-satisfied possession of Euclidean geometry that offers us the impression, or the illusion, that it has, that world, already been encompassed in a manageable intellectual structure. The lineaments of that structure are well known: as in the rest of life, something is given and something is gotten; but the logic behind those lineaments is apt to pass unnoticed, and it is the logic that controls the system. — David Berlinski

As he fell asleep he was still thinking of the subject which now occupied his mind all of the time - of life and death.

'Love? What is love?' he mused.

'Love Hinders death. Love is life. Anything at all that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is - everything exists - only because I love. All is bound up in love alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a tiny particle of love, shall return to the universal and eternal source.' These thoughts seemed comforting to him. But they were only thoughts. Something was wanting in them, there was something one-sided and personal, something intellectual. They were not self-evident. And he was prey to the same restlessness and uncertainty. He fell asleep. — Leo Tolstoy

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

We hold from God the gift which, as far as we are concerned, contains all others, Life - physical, intellectual, and moral life. — Frederic Bastiat

Who am I? What am I doing here? Who are these others? This trilogy of spiritual conundrums is as practical as it is philosophical. Mindful inquiry devoted to these three questions is as spiritual as it is material and as obvious as it is unanswerable. Knowledge isn't to comfort our souls; it is to enhance awareness - that is what some call an awakening. Some things have to be believed to be seen. Feelings articulate truth in ways that our brains cannot. We may have a sense about who we are, what our purpose is and how we relate to the rest of the world even without the vocabulary to articulate it. Recovery is visceral as much as it is intellectual. The Eleventh Step is our spiritual barometer, feeding back sensations, feelings and thoughts as we observe our life. — Joe C.

For us, not cooperating in the monopoly regimes of intellectual property rights and patents and biodiversity - saying "no" to patents on life, and developing intellectual ideas of resistance - is very much a continuation of Gandhian satyagraha. It is, for me, keeping life free in its diversity. — Vandana Shiva

The readiness to sacrifice one's personal work and, if necessary, even one's life for others shows its most highly developed form in the Aryan race. The greatness of the Aryan is not based on his intellectual powers; but rather on his willingness to devote all his faculties to the service of his community. — Adolf Hitler

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States ... — George Orwell

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out. — Iris Murdoch

What we want in students is creativity and a willingness to fail. I always say to students, 'If you've never at some point stayed up all night talking to your new boyfriend about the meaning of life instead of preparing for the test, then you're not really an intellectual.' — Alison Gopnik

The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice. — George Santayana

Being is presented as the foundation of all that 'there is', and Life presupposes Being, just like Wisdom or any intellectual activity 20 presupposes Life — Anonymous

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

The judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can and ought to be made worth living, ... underlies all intellectual effort; it is the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical) rejects theory itself. — Herbert Marcuse

If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur, then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is diminished or extinguished. Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human. — Thomas Berry

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

What is enthusiasm but a passionate belief in what seems to be a high and holy aim, - an unselfish devotion to some noble cause, - a consecration of heart and mind and soul to the attainment of a great object? What is it but an earnest effort to attain the heights of spiritual and intellectual endeavor? What is it but the life, the force, the power, which makes individuals or nations capable of enduring much and waiting long, in the conviction that ultimately the thing they have at heart will be accomplished? — Orison Swett Marden

The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. — Henry David Thoreau

Faith is the avenue to salvation. Not intellectual understanding. Not money. Not your works. Just simple faith. How much faith? The faith of a mustard seed, so small you can hardly see it. But if you will put that little faith in the person of Jesus, your life will be changed. He will come with supernatural power into your heart. It can happen to you. — Billy Graham

And so we have this Oklahoma City, set upon a foundation so strong that it cannot be shaken. What shall you, the inheritors, do with this city? We hope that you shall make it more and more the city beautiful, more and more the city intellectual, more and more the city spiritual. For these three, beauty, mind, and spirit are the choicest diadems of life.

"Morituri vos salutamus!" Which, in this case, may be translated, "We, the Pioneers, salute you! — Angelo C. Scott

I've noticed over the past years of my writerly life that women writers in particular are discouraged in cleverly disguised forms from including the intellectual in their creative material way more than you would believe. — Lidia Yuknavitch

The real danger is found in Humanity's refusal to move beyond the trap of instinct and into the intellectual mind. The refusal to accept our health and the health of every other living thing on this planet must always come before profit. Whether it's the oil companies, pharmaceutical companies; or anyone else; we are not Gods no matter how much the New Agers like to proclaim it. In that path lies the rubble of the enemy of life, his Fallen God Bombers and his murderous dark medics. Out of that emanates the force of fear; fear of judgement, fear of difference and fear the other will bring you pain. — Cole J. Davis

Laughter is one of the great beacons in life because we don't refract it by gunning it through our intellectual prism. What makes us laugh is a mystery - an involuntary response. — Dennis Miller