Intellectual quotes
1.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside intellectual — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I do my intellectual work inside myself, and once I am with my fellow creatures it is more or less a matter of indifference to me whether or not they are intelligent as long as they are kind, sincere, etc."
"A great deal of time and intellectual force are lost in the world, because the false seems great and the truth so small and insignificant."
"In all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny."
"I make one image—though 'make' is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict."
"I learnt from Hussein how to achieve victory while being oppressed."
"It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue."
"It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate."
"The teacher’s first duty is to watch over the environment, and this takes precedence over all the rest. It’s influence is indirect, but unless it be well done there will be no effective and permanent results of any kind, physical, intellectual or spiritual."
"Rescue the drowning and tie your shoestrings."
"The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes."
"The intellect is a cold thing and a merely intellectual idea will never stimulate thought in the same manner that a spiritual idea does."
"Habit is necessary. It is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways."
"The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual - all of that fermenting together. It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture."
"Strenuous intellectual work and the study of God's Nature are the angels that will lead me through all the troubles of this life with consolation, strength, and uncompromising rigor."
"It is only men who are free, who create the inventions and intellectual works which to us moderns make life worth while."
"The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes."
"Let each become all that he was created capable of being."
"The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence."
"Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness."
"Only a few individuals succeed in throwing off mythology in a time of a certain intellectual supremacy--the mass never frees itself."
