Explore Quotes on Intellectual

Physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body, it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity.

People don't always realize that my parents shared a sense of intellectual curiosity and a love of reading and of history.

How could anything non-controversial be of intellectual interest to grown-ups?

Our students wanted to know everything: but only the newest theory seemed to them worth bothering with. Knowing nothing of the intellectual achievements of the past, they kept fresh and intact their enthusiasm for 'the latest thing'. Fashion dominated their interest: they valued ideas not for themselves but for the prestige that they could wring from them.

It seems to me a fundamental dishonesty, and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it's useful and not because you think it's true.

The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.

optimism, n. The doctrine, or belief, that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong. It is held with greatest tenacity by those most accustomed to the mischance of falling into adversity, and is most acceptably expounded with disproof - an intellectual disorder, yielding to no treatment but death. It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious.

A l'intérieur de ce corps vivait l'âme d'une intellectuelle et poète dont personne n'avait le soupçon. Within this body lived the soul of an intellectual and poet, which nobody had suspected.

Jesus did not get stuck in intellectual arguments with people. He did not go for the intellect; He went for the conscience. He spoke to that part of the person that knows the difference between right and wrong instinctively.

However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of such things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots knew!

Dogs are wonderful, and in many ways unique. But they are remarkably unremarkable in their intellectual and experiential capacities. Pigs are every bit as intelligent and feeling, by any sensible definition of the words. They can't hop into the back of a Volvo, but they can fetch, run and play, be mischievous, and reciprocate affection. So why don't they get to curl up by the fire? Why can't they at least be spared being tossed on the fire?

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

Intellectual understanding does not always bring visceral belief.

People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt.

You don't get to be a respected intellectual by uttering truisms in monosyllables.

Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.

Everybody should read fiction… I don’t think serious fiction is written for a few people. I think we live in a stupid culture that won’t educate its people to read these things. It would be a much more interesting place if it would. And it’s not just that mechanics and plumbers don’t read literary fiction, it’s that doctors and lawyers don’t read literary fiction. It has nothing to do with class, it has to do with an anti-intellectual culture that doesn’t trust art.