Intellectual Quotes

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I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.

Raymond Chandler

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.

I consider it important, indeed urgently necessary, for intellectual workers to get together, both to protect their own economic status and, also, generally speaking, to secure their influence in the political field.

Albert Einstein

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.

Denotation by means of sounds and markings is a remarkable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me; several lines a million things. How easy becomes the manipulation of the universe here, how evident the concentration of the intellectual world! Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the word Liberty entire nations.

Intellectual food is like any other; it is pleasanter and more beneficial to take it with a spoon than a shovel.

How significant is the enormous heightening, under mescalin, of the perception of color! … Man's highly developed color sense is a biological luxury—inestimably precious to him as an intellectual and spiritual being, but unnecessary to his survival as an animal. … Mescalin raises all colors to a higher power and makes the percipient aware of innumerable fine shades of difference, to which, at ordinary times, he is completely blind. It would seem that, for Mind at Large, the so-called secondary characters of things are primary.

Terrorists bow to the spontaneity of the passionate indignation of intellectuals, who lack the ability or opportunity to connect the revolutionary struggle and the working-class movement into an integral whole. It is difficult indeed for those who have lost their belief, or who have never believed, that this is possible, to find some outlet for their indignation and revolutionary energy other than terror.

All teaching and all intellectual learning come about from already existing knowledge.

Communism I like, but Communist intellectuals are savages.

Jean-Paul Sartre

How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the contemplation of natural phenomena to the preservation of moral and intellectual health!

Henry David Thoreau

The object of basic education is the physical, intellectual and moral development of children through the medium of handicraft.

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.

We always come back to the same vicious circle — an extreme degree of material or intellectual poverty does away with the means of alleviating it.

Simone de Beauvoir

The fault of many of our artists and intellectuals lies in their original sin: they are not true revolutionaries. We can try to graft the elm tree so that it will bear pears, but at the same time we must plant pear trees. New generations will come that will be free of original sin.

In the Spanish people there is a mixture of Gothic, Frankish and Moorish blood. One can speak of the Spaniard as one would speak of a brave anarchist. The Arabian epoch—the Arabs look down on the Turks as they do on dogs—was the most cultured, the most intellectual and in every way best and happiest epoch in Spanish history. It was followed by the period of the persecutions with its unceasing atrocities.

There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

Bertrand Russell

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay—in solid cash—the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

I had supposed until that time that it was quite common for parents to love their children, but the war persuaded me that it is a rare exception. I had supposed that most people liked money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked destruction even better. I had supposed that intellectuals frequently loved truth, but I found here again that not ten per cent of them prefer truth to popularity.

Bertrand Russell

Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

All intellectuals should suffer a certain amount of persecution as early in life as possible. Not too much. That is bad for them. But a certain amount.

Bertrand Russell