Quotes on Intellectual

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

The writing of the Beatles, or John and Paul's contribution to the Beatles in the late sixties - had a kind of depth to it, a more mature, more intellectual approach. We were different people, we were older. We knew each other in all kinds of different ways than when we wrote together as teenagers and in our older twenties.

The 'free-floating intellectual' may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.

Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing.

My success was not based so much on any great intelligence but on great common sense.

A society that does not use the intellectual power of its female population fully is not a wise society. Most women are not as tainted by mistakes in the conduct of the economy as the male population, and now they deserve an opportunity.

Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!

It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the over-population of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat.

Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation.

Given the power and influence that science increasingly has in our daily lives, it is important that we as citizens of an open and democratic society learn to separate good science from bunk. This is not just a matter of intellectual curiosity, as it affects where large portions of our tax money go, and in some cases even whether people’s lives are lost as a result of nonsense.

The core of science is not a mathematical modeling--it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.

If the religious experience were simply some naive impression of the uninformed it would not have resulted in such intellectual insight, such spiritual exaltation, such spectacular religious ritual, or in the immense volume of song and poetry and literature and dance that humans have produced.

Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.

If you have somebody who's brilliant and highly creative with a different point of view than you have, and a very different intellectual background, great things can happen.

Whether in the intellectual pursuits of science or in the mystical pursuits of the spirit, the light beckons ahead, and the purpose surging in our nature responds.

Conventional measures of mental ability, such as intelligence tests and scholarship, show some of the very highest records belong to INFP and INFJ types, who relegate thinking to last place or next to last. The preference for thinking appears to have far less intellectual effect than the preference for intuition, even in some technical fields, such as scientific research, where its influence was expected to be most important.

On those who overanalyze his music: When you tear the wings off a butterfly, it is no longer a butterfly

Where nothing in a person's earlier years lends itself to an old age devoted to continuing intellectual and physical pursuits, a late-life interest in Tolstoy or even crossword puzzles is unlikely to appear, no matter the urging by well-intentioned social workers or people like me who write books about it.

Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.

I don't see myself as a hero because what I'm doing is self-interested: I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.

The colour of the skin is in no way connected with strength of the mind or intellectual powers.