Intellectual quotes
1.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"... where does strength come from? It is not muscle strength any more. It is not also mere intellectual strength. What is strength? Strength is the support of the people."
"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."
"Even the simple act that we call "going to visit a person of our acquaintance" is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role."
"Science would not be what it is if there had not been a Galileo, a Newton or a Lavoisier, any more than music would be what it is if Bach, Beethoven and Wagner had never lived. The world as we know it is the product of its geniuses-and there may be evil as well as beneficent genius-and to deny that fact, is to stultify all history, whether it be that of the intellectual or the economic world."
"Who are a little wise the best fools be."
"The underlying intellectual argument for seeking to tax economic rents retains its force."
"Rage is a sign of nothing but immaturity. The power of any faith comes not from its coercion of critics and dissenters. It comes from the moral integrity and the intellectual strength of its believers."
"The distinction between mind and body is an artificial dichotomy, a discrimination which is unquestionably based far more on the peculiarity of intellectual understanding than on the nature of things."
"Bad television is three things: a bullet train to a morally bankrupt youth, a slow spiral into an intellectual void, and of course, a complete blast to watch."
"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."
"Examples of selling of ideas are portrayed in consulting or paid advice, as the pricing of intellectual property is market driven."
"Even babies like to grab for things just beyond their reach."
"To a mind of sufficient intellectual power, the whole of mathematics would appear trivial, as trivial as the statement that a four-footed animal is an animal."
"The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other."
"I am an innovator. This is a term of distinction, a term of honor, rather than something to hide or apologize for. Anyone who has new or valuable ideas to offer stands outside the intellectual status quo. But the status quo is not a stream, let alone a 'mainstream'. It is a stagnant swamp. It is the innovators who carry mankind forward."
"It is He who gave to this intellectual nature free-will of such a kind, that if he wishes to forsake God his blessedness, misery should forthwith result."
"Faith journeys are never simply intellectual exercises."
"Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis."
"The help which tends to make us spiritually strong is the highest help, next to it comes intellectual help and after that comes physical help."
"If God existed (a question concerning which Jubal maintained a meticulous intellectual neutrality) and if He desired to be worshiped (a proposition which Jubal found inherently improbable but conceivably possible in the dim light of his own ignorance), then (stipulating affirmatively both the above) it nevertheless seemed wildly unlikely to Jubal to the point of reductio ad absurdum that a God potent to shape galaxies would be titillated and swayed by the whoop-te-do nonsense the Fosterites offered Him as "worship."
