intellect Quotes

Intellectually, they knew a great deal. Practically, they chose to know almost nothing.

“To be smart is not a sin. But to be smart and not use it, that, Peekay, is a sin.”

“‘Experts, what did I tell you about experts, Peekay?’ ‘You can’t always go by expert opinion. A chicken, if you ask a chicken, should be stuffed with grasshoppers, mieles, and worms.‘”

“Your brain, Peekay, has two functions; it is a place for original thought, but also it is a reference library. Use it to tell you where to look, and then you will have for yourself all the brains that have ever been.”

“It was astonishing that a man of his intellect could stoop so low as he did—but that was too harsh a phrase—could depend so much as he did upon people’s praise.”

“Man, by reason of his greater intellect, can more reasonably hope to equal birds in knowledge than to equal nature in the perfection of her machinery.”

“The individual human mind. In a child’s power to master the multiplication table there is more sanctity than in all your shouted ‘Amens!‘, ‘Holy, Holies!’ and ‘Hosannahs!’ An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man’s knowledge is more of a miracle than any sticks turned to snakes, or the parting of waters!”

“In those days he really didn’t know what he was talking about; that is to say, he was a young jail kid all hung-up on the wonderful possibilities of becoming a real intellectual, and he liked to talk in the tone and using the words, but in a jumbled way, that he had heard from “real intellectuals” - although, mind you, he wasn’t so naive as that in all other things, and it took him just a few months with Carlo Marx to become completely in there with all the terms and jargon. Nonetheless we understood each other on other levels of madness, and I agreed that he could stay at my house till he found a job and furthermore we agreed to go out West sometime. That was the winter of 1947.”

“The climate of intellectual freedom and experimentation was unlike anywhere else in the Western world.”

“When you come right to it, it is easier to die than it is to use your head.”

“I wondered if she would teach able-bodied third graders the same way. Probably not. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got.”

“…there was already something in his gaze beyond the capacity of any ape. In those dark, deep-set eyes was a dawning awareness—the first intimations of an intelligence that could not possibly fulfill itself for ages yet, and might soon be extinguished forever.”

“The intellect is always fooled by the heart.”

“The nature of the case and the history of philosophy combine to recommend to us this division of intellectual labour between Academies and Universities.”

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.”

“The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.”

“To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and 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.”