Quotes About Intellect

It is not that the intellect sometimes misunderstands. Rather, the intellect always misunderstands. It is not that the intellect sometimes errs, it is that the intellect is the error.

We don't always possess faith in the sense of having a clear embodiment of something to hang on to. The relationship between the intellect and faith is a very curious one. Sometimes the intellect can point us to faith, sometimes the intellect can stand in the way of faith. Sometimes, as St John of the Cross points out, we have to darken or blind the intellect in order to have faith.

One can hardly appreciate how academia has perverted its highest tasks and "ideals" without pondering long and hard the implications of Jacques Barzun's House of Intellect and its Hegelian/Bergsonian contrast between rigidified "intellect" and always-growing "intelligence." This fundamentally Hegelian distinction, needless to say, cuts to the quick of the contrast between Platonic and Aristotelian forms of philosophy.

The age of warrior kings and of warrior presidents has passed. The nuclear age calls for a different kind of leadership.... a leadership of intellect, judgment, tolerance and rationality, a leadership committed to human values, to world peace, and to the improvement of the human condition. The attributes upon which we must draw are the human attributes of compassion and common sense, of intellect and creative imagination, and of empathy and understanding between cultures.

You should be able to use your intellect and not to be dominated by your intellect.

Intellect is a part of a good faith. Intellect is the light, the heart is the direction.

In Savasana or in meditation, the light of the eyes is drawn towards the lotus of the heart, so that the seat of the intelligence of the head is brought into contact with the seat of the intelligence of the heart, which is called the mind. Thus one passes from the individualistic state of consciousness to the universal state of consciousness. It is the merging of the intellect of the brain with the intellect of the soul.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''

Why should we desire the destruction of human passions? Take passions from human beings and what is left? The great object should be not to destroy passions, but to make them obedient to the intellect. To indulge passion to the utmost is one form of intemperance - to destroy passion is another. The reasonable gratification of passion under the domination of the intellect is true wisdom and perfect virtue.

Intellect is not wisdom one must understand. They're two things - wisdom and intellect.

Wants awaken intellect. To gratify them disciplines intellect. The keener the want the lustier the growth.

The Life of the intellect is the best and pleasantest for man, because the intellect more than anything else is the man. Thus it will be the happiest life as well.

Intellect, without heart, is infinitely cruel. . . . So that, after all, the real aristocracy must be that of goodness where the intellect is directed by the heart.

Fancy, an animal faculty, is very different from imagination, which is intellectual. The former is passive; but the latter is active and creative. Children, the weak minded, and the timid are full of fancy. Men and women of intellect, of great intellect, are alone possessed of great imagination.

Commemoration of Gilbert of Sempringham, Founder of the Gilbertine Order, 1189 Some there are who presume so far on their wits that they think themselves capable of measuring the whole nature of things by their intellect, in that they esteem all things true which they see, and false which they see not. Accordingly, in order that man's mind might be freed from this presumption, and seek the truth humbly, it was necessary that certain things far surpassing his intellect should be proposed to man by God.

People often talk about Plotinus' system. The reason they do this is that Plotinus postulated a kind of series or chain of principles, so at the top there's what he called the One. Below the One is what he called Intellect. Below Intellect is Soul, and the effect of the soul is the physical world that we actually live in.

Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect.

Once one assumes an attitude of intolerance, there is no knowing where it will take one. Intolerance, someone has said, is violence to the intellect and hatred is violence to the heart.

The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.

You want to get rich in order that you may surround yourself with beautiful things, see distant lands, feed your mind, and develop your intellect; in order that you may love others and do kind things, and be able to play a good part in helping the world to find truth.

Theory is good for the intellect, but action is good for the soul. It's also good for your mental health, your physical health, and your pocketbook.

...These healers...my intellect has been unable to assimilate their theories....But their facts are patent and startling; and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I believe, be a public calamity.

At the center of the Universe is a loving heart that continues to beat and that wants the best for every person. Anything that we can do to help foster the intellect and spirit and emotional growth of our fellow human beings, that is our job. Those of us who have this particular vision must continue against all odds. Life is for service.

I do not believe that Obama is smarter than anybody else. I do not believe he has cut a new path and is a politician unlike any we've ever seen regarding his intellect. I don't believe any of this hocus-pocus. I didn't believe it when they said it about Hillary, Smartest Woman in the World.

When we understand the outside of things, we think we have them. Yet the Lord puts his things in subdefined, suggestive shapes, yielding no satisfactory meaning to the mere intellect, but unfolding themselves to the conscience and heart.

Always consider your intellect to be lacking; otherwise too much faith in it surely leads to error.

I think good art has good concept behind it. Nothing can always articulate fully the way a Ph.D. candidate can articulate their thesis, because artists work with a combination of intuition and intellect blended together and out comes whatever they produce. So it's a blend of kind of a sensual response to material and an intellectual response to idea, maybe a blend of the two.

We have seen that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

Philosophy is man’s expression of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect.

The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.

Intellect in its effort to explain Love got stuck in the mud like an ass. Love alone could explain love and loving.

Intellect is the soul of man, the only immortal part of him.

Paris is a mighty schoolmaster, a grand enlightener of the provincial intellect.

One thing about having mostly absent parents that I think was perhaps "good" for the development of my intellect/writing is that I was given almost total freedom to read/write/look at whatever I wanted. I wonder a lot about how my past experiences, particularly my negative childhood (home life and being severely bullied/ostracized throughout school) as formed my/my thoughts/my writing, though I should also note those things were far from the only thing that had an impact on me/my writing.

The failure of the Reformation to capture France had left for Frenchmen no half-way house between infallibility and infidelity; and while the intellect of Germany and England moved leisurely in the lines of religious evolution, the mind of France leaped from the hot faith which had massacred the Huguenots to the cold hostility with which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach, and Diderot turned upon the religion of the fathers.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.

The extravagance of intellect outstrips the extravagance of desire.

A man's liberal and conservative phases seem to follow each other in a succession of waves from the time he is born. Children are radicals. Youths are conservatives, with a dash of criminal negligence. Men in their prime are liberals (as long as their digestion keeps pace with their intellect). The middle aged run to shelter: they insure their life, draft a will, accumulate mementos and occasional tables, and hope for security. And then comes old age, which repeats childhood - a time full of humors and sadness, but often full of courage and even prophecy.

All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.

I'd love for my ambition and will and intellect and sense of humour to define me as well. I'm definitely responsible for the image that I put out there. But it does become frustrating, because I don't want 'sexy' to be my defining characteristic.

The bad guys I play don't want to be bad. It's the struggle between the part of them that's an animal and the part that's the intellect that's interesting.

Most of us consist of two separated parts, trying desperately to bring themselves together into an integrated soma, where the distinctions between mind and body, feelings and intellect, would be obliterated.

Clothes form the intellect of the dandy.

The deluded mind is the mind affectively burdened by intellect. Thus, it cannot move without stopping and reflecting on itself. This obstructs its native fluidity.

One of the primary services the arts can render to theology is their integrative power, their ability to interrelate the intellect with the other facets of our human makeup.

That alone can be called true refinement which elevates the soul of man, purifying the manners by improving the intellect.