Intellectual Quotes

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But what of the voice and judgment of conscience? The difficulty is that we have a conscience behind our conscience, an intellectual one behind the moral. … We can see quite well that our opinions of what is noble and good, our moral valuations, are powerful levers where action is concerned; but we must begin by refining these opinions and independently creating for ourselves new tables of values.

One reason that Christian theology is so detached from larger intellectual or artistic movements is that it has not suffered consciously a crisis of its expressive forms. At a cultural moment when most humanistic disciplines—not to say, literature and all of the fine arts—have passed through several generations of radical formal innovation, theology is still written as if the conventional forms posed no problems.

If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea. The effect is as observable in politics as in theology: the intellectual function can be overwhelmed by an excess of piety expended within too contracted a frame of reference.

Richard Hofstadter

We exhort the compromisers to open their hearts to truth, to free themselves of their wretched and blind circumspection, of their intellectual arrogance, and of the servile fear which dries up their souls and paralyzes their movements.
Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!

Mikhail Bakunin

Intellectual humility and the keen sense of our ignorance are the necessary starting points for genuine philosophical development; therefore, books—even as they transmit brilliant philosophical insights—undercut philosophy at its root.

We know well that all new cultural beginnings today must be part of world culture; that no truly intellectual life can occur if the mind is restricted; that no art can have genuine and everlasting value if it is not in a universal language. East and West. God knows there is enough restriction. Enough laziness of stereotypes. Smash them, we say to ourselves. And the only way to do that is to open up a true world forum that is absolutely free.

C. Wright Mills

To draw and paint is an elementary thing, it has to be done. But it can be a mental process, intellectual process, thought process. It is a question of temperament of each artist, there are abstract painters, figurative painters, painters who work in silence or who don't want to work at all, but they continue with ideas in their mind and in their soul. It's very fascinating; it's a vast area without rules or regulations.

The science of life has nowadays to a certain extent become a crossroad, in which the contemporary intellectual developments converge. The biological theories have acquired a tremendous ideological [weltanschauliche], yes even public and political significance... The condition of biology, problematic in many respects, has led to the situation that the philosophies of life were until now by no means satisfactory from the scientific as much as the practical point of view; we see all the more clearly the importance of the theoretical clarification of biology.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy

Analytical philosophy was very interesting. It always struck me as being very interesting and full of tremendous intellectual curiosities. It is wonderful to see the mind at work in such an intense manner, but, for me, it was still too far removed from my own issues.

An abyss seems to have opened between the intellectual cosmopolites of culture and the people, hungry for word and meaning.

Meridel Le Sueur

Agnosticism is not properly described as a "negative" creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle which is as much ethical as intellectual.

Thomas Henry Huxley

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.

Being advised by his medical friends to try the effects of travelling, with light intellectual exercise, he left London in the latter end of last summer, and spent several months in wandering through the factory districts of Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, &c., with the happiest results to his health ; having everywhere experienced the utmost kindness and liberality from the mill-proprietors.

Books are the true levelers. They give to all who will faithfully use them the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am. No matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling. If the Sacred Writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof, … I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live.

William Ellery Channing

The high intellectual value of images, however, lies in the fact that they usually, and perhaps always, fit more than one actual experience.

Intellectual controversies tend to be like dog fights without the teeth, in which the barking not the biting does the damage.

Luís Fernando Veríssimo

Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.

The end of philosophic education, on many ancient views, is not a body of propositions to be measured against an equally propositional and already apprehended truth. The end is, rather, the having (hexis, habitus) of abiding intellectual excellences, of a power (arete, virtus) to think truthfully.

His ideas are informed by a painfully honest humanism, and everyone—even his enemies—agrees that he is one of the greatest theoreticians of the post-EU era. But his intellectual integrity prevents him from rising to the very top, and his fellow travelers are much ruder about him than his ideological enemies, accusing him of the ultimate political crime—valuing truth over power.

The history of literature is the history of the human mind. It is, as compared with other histories, the intellectual as distinguished from the material, the informing spirit as compared with the outward and visible.

William H. Prescott

Futurity should cease to be a predicament and should become a program: we should radicalize it to empower ourselves. That is the reason to take an interest in ways of organizing thought and society in ways that diminish the influence of what happened before on what can happen next. Such intellectual and institutional innovations make change in thought less dependent on the pressure of unmastered anomalies and change in society less dependent on the blows of unexpected trauma.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

People are people, and all people have emotions and biases, rarely understood: intellectual and emotional behavior don't necessarily have an inverse correlation. Oppenheimer, as superhuman and wise as he was in so many ways, was still a human being. Depending upon the occasion he could be as human (dramatic, overwhelming, megalomaniacal, self-serving, and even downright dishonest, as his arch-rival Edward Teller was accused of being, and was) as most of us. Like most of us, depending upon the circumstances, he could change his personality and alleged beliefs at the drop of a hat.

Samuel T. Cohen

A knowledge of Greek thought and life, and of the arts in which the Greeks expressed their thought and sentiment, is essential to high culture. A man may know everything else, but without this knowledge he remains ignorant of the best intellectual and moral achievements of his own race.

Charles Eliot Norton

The guesses which serve to give mental unity and wholeness to a chaos of scattered particulars, are accidents which rarely occur to any minds but those abounding in knowledge and disciplined in intellectual combinations.

John Stuart Mill

This mechanistic approach to psychiatry is being used extensively at present; I think it can be stated unequivocally that it is fraught with extreme danger. There is not only an emotional but an intellectual change in the patients. Those who have seen fighters that have been in many battles know the 'punch-drunk' or 'slap-happy' conditions and may recognize a similar state in some patients after shock therapy.

Roy R. Grinker, Sr.