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69f01a5 I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix. sherlock-holmes intellect Arthur Conan Doyle
f9d4269 In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. spiritual philosophy brahma ganges indra vishnu hinduism sacred reverence priest gods intellect respect Henry David Thoreau
ced14d1 I have a realistic grasp of my own strengths and weaknesses. My mind is my weapon. My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer, and I have my mind... and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge. That's why I read so much, Jon Snow. reading strength tyrion-lannister intellect George R.R. Martin
fc2edc3 Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values--that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others--that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human--that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay--that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live--that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road--that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up--that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction. morality work life love productivity intellect loyalty Ayn Rand
4c3b6b3 I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness - a real thorough-going illness. illness reason notes-from-the-underground fyodor-dostoyevsky disease intellect Fyodor Dostoyevsky
9cce14b "You could give a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after , , , , , and their colleagues. I'm not saying you're more intelligent than understanding science einstein aristotle crick francis-crick james-d-watson james-watson max-planck planck polymath watson charles-darwin darwin intellect knowledge isaac-newton newton Richard Dawkins
b941368 I wonder if anyone but me realizes what goes on in that head back of your deceptively sweet face. intelligence intellect Margaret Mitchell
7e7e8cb I wish I could make him understand that a loving good heart is riches enough, and that without it intellect is poverty. adam-and-eve morality inspirational intellect Mark Twain
47fe022 We are on strike, we, the men of the mind. We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one's happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt. work life pursuit-of-happiness rewards intellect Ayn Rand
5c5e3ee And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect. stupidity tolstoy dishonesty trickery intellect pride Leo Tolstoy
eb657d6 Where instinct fails, intellect must venture. intellect instinct Jim Butcher
a041cd9 "Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Dawkins thinks maybe a quarter-of-a-million. I'll take 100,000. In order to be a Christian, you have to believe that for 98,000 years, our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth. Famine, struggle, bitterness, war, suffering, misery, all of that for 98,000 years. Heaven watches this with complete indifference. And then 2000 years ago, thinks 'That's enough of that. It's time to intervene,' and the best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Don't lets appeal to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization. Let's go to the desert and have another revelation there. This is nonsense. It can't be believed by a thinking person. Why am I glad this is the case? To get to the point of the wrongness of Christianity, because I think the teachings of Christianity are immoral. The central one is the most immoral of all, and that is the one of vicarious redemption. You can throw your sins onto somebody else, vulgarly known as scapegoating. In fact, originating as scapegoating in the same area, the same desert. I can pay your debt if I love you. I can serve your term in prison if I love you very much. I can volunteer to do that. I can't take your sins away, because I can't abolish your responsibility, and I shouldn't offer to do so. Your responsibility has to stay with you. There's no vicarious redemption. There very probably, in fact, is no redemption at all. It's just a part of wish-thinking, and I don't think wish-thinking is good for people either. myth responsibility morality reason fear love truth atheist-argument christianity-is-immoral christopher-hitchens compulsory divine-dictatorship eternal-punishment great-atheist-argument hitchens hitchslap homo-sapiens immoral-christianity love-your-neighbor supreme-being dawkins indifference human-sacrifice eternal-father totalitarianism debate dictatorship richard-dawkins wishful-thinking belief evidence ethics atheism health intellect atheist redemption crime guilt Christopher Hitchens
4d64351 ...and the vessel was not full, his intellect was not satisfied, his soul was not at peace, his heart was not still. siddhartha restlessness intellect soul Hermann Hesse
41a967c My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect--simply a confession of failures. imagination shallow intellect loyalty Oscar Wilde
347d068 A man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long. reality life-lessons intellect Hunter S. Thompson
a5e0122 The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable--namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man. For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them. evolution sympathy morality science evolution-of-morality social intellect instincts Charles Darwin
72533ee The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist mind science economists expertise economics intellect Nassim Nicholas Taleb
bf0703e But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal line which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not int he intrinsic quality of the scene reflected. time seed social proust genius talent intellect Marcel Proust
f2df499 Allow intelligent design into science textbooks, lecture halls, and laboratories, and the cost to the frontier of scientific discovery--the frontier that drives the economies of the future--would be incalculable. I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before. reason research intelligent-design intellect Neil deGrasse Tyson
e67a2d3 I sought her eye, desirous to read there the intelligence which I could not discern in her face or hear in her conversation; it was merry, rather small; by turns I saw vivacity, vanity, coquetry, look out through its irid, but I watched in vain for a glimpse of soul. I am no Oriental; white necks, carmine lips and cheeks, clusters of bright curls, do not suffice for me without that Promethean spark which will live after the roses and lilies are faded, the burnished hair grown grey. In sunshine, in prosperity, the flowers are very well; but how many wet days are there in life--November seasons of disaster, when a man's hearth and home would be cold indeed, without the clear, cheering gleam of intellect. spark intellect Charlotte Brontë
c98c0d7 As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name--the --for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher .) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them to think also. enlightenment christianity religion education life assimilation chabad-messianism dialectics haskalah isaiah-berlin menachem-mendel-schneerson messianism moses-mendelssohn prohibitions rebbes rituals rabbis exile monotheism judaism old-testament germans free-thought return study ethics plagiarism prophecy atheism voltaire islam intellect antisemitism thought evil Christopher Hitchens
fbccacf What is more tragic than to see a person who has risen to the disciplined heights of tough-mindedness but has at the same time sunk to the passionless depths of hard-heartedness? mind love inspirational intellect Martin Luther King Jr.
7d09ba1 The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. poetry music stimulation character-building taste emotions intellect Charles Darwin
5dbbee1 When I start a new seminar I tell my students that I will undoubtedly contradict myself, and that I will mean both things. But an acceptance of contradiction is no excuse for fuzzy thinking. We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledge that they cannot take us all the way. mind imagination wisdom contradiction intellect Madeleine L'Engle
b6cb390 This was a townscape raised in the teeth of cold winds from the east; a city of winding cobbled streets and haughty pillars; a city of dark nights and candlelight, and intellect. edinburgh intellect city Alexander McCall Smith
33f21dd It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal. superiority criminals sherlock-holmes intellect detectives london Arthur Conan Doyle
9a62fdc I read a page of Plato's great work. I can no longer understand anything, because behind the words on the page, which have their own heavenly brightness, to be sure, there shines an even brighter, an enormous, dazzling -why- that blots out everything, cancels out, destroys all meaning. All individual intelligence. When one has understood, one stops, satisfied with what one has understood. I do not understand. Understanding is far too little. To have understood is to be fixed, immobilized. It is as though one wanted to stop on one step in the middle of a staircase, or with one foot in the void and the other on the endless stair. But a mere why, a new why can set one off again, can unpetrify what was petrified and everything starts flowing afresh. How can one understand? One cannot. understanding meaning fixity why limits intellect Eugène Ionesco
9b6dd2a A certain amount of reverie is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It soothes the fever, occasionally high, of the brain at work, and produces in the mind a soft, fresh vapor that corrects the all too angular contours of pure thought, fills up the gaps and intervals here and there, binds them together, and dulls the sharp corners of ideas. But too much reverie submerges and drowns. Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie it's pleasure. To replace thought with reverie is to confound poison with nourishment. reverie intellect thought Victor Hugo
bb2c587 "Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self--to the mediating intellect--as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode, although the gloom, "the blues" which people go through occasionally and associate with the general hassle of everyday existence are of such prevalence that they do give many individuals a hint of the illness in its catastrophic form." illness pain existence depression incomprehensible gloom elusive mood self intellect William Styron
b049b34 The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument. science intellect Madeleine L'Engle
f136135 In every man there are two minds that work side by side, the one checking the other; thus emotion stands against reason, intellect corrects passion and first impressions act a little, but very little, before quick reflection. man passion reason rational impression irrational reflection intellect Ford Madox Ford
0c134b8 All being, it seemed, was built on opposites, on division. Man or woman, vagabond or citizen, lover or thinker -- no breath could both be in and out, none could be man and wife, free and yet orderly, knowing the urge of life and the joy of intellect. Always the one paid for the other, though each was equally precious and essential. yin-and-yang intellect Hermann Hesse
4bae9b4 Is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks. mental intellect Herman Melville
fd0fbf0 ... the mind was designed not to defend what we want, but to discover what is ultimately true, which should shape our wants and satisfy them more deeply with God. The purpose of the mind is not to rationalize subjective preferences, but to recognize objective reality and to help the heart revel in God. mind god truth objectivity intellect John Piper
beb6f25 He had just reached the time of life at which 'young' is ceasing to be the prefix of 'man' in speaking of one. He was at the brightest period of masculine life, for his intellect and emotions were clearly separate; he had passed the time during which the influence of youth indiscriminately mingles them in the character of impulse, and he had not yet arrived at the state wherin they become united again, in the character of prejudice, by the influence of a wife and family.In short he was twenty-eight and a bachelor. youth-age masculinity intellect Thomas Hardy
77545e4 The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch. heart intellect Herman Melville
49a3b27 Upon the one thing every writer absolutely must have, and that is intellectual curiosity. writing-advice intellect curiosity writers Phillip Athans
530f8e5 Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact. emotion philosophy courageous philosopher sentimentality hard friedrich-nietzsche nietzsche facts intellect ideas H.L. Mencken
aef36d0 I've always believed in instinct over intellect. The instinct is what you always knew; intellect is what you figure out. intellect Michka Assayas
2f1e7e3 That was the way with Casaubon's hard intellectual labours. Their most characteristic result was not the 'Key to all Mythologies', but a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he had not demonstrably merited - a perpetual suspicious conjecture that the views entertained of him were not to his advantage - a melancholy absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and a passionate resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing. Thus his intellectual ambition which seemed to others to have absorbed and dried him, was really no security against wounds validation intellect George Eliot
031875e Compare King William with the philosopher Haeckel. The king is one of the anointed by the most high, as they claim--one upon whose head has been poured the divine petroleum of authority. . Compare with Queen Victoria. The Queen is clothed in garments given her by blind fortune and unreasoning chance, while . The world is beginning to pay homage to intellect, to genius, to heart. We have advanced. . heroic bravery sacrifice heart king-william benefit ernst-haeckel haeckel homage eliot glory george-eliot queen-victoria chance genius sublime intellect colossus Robert G. Ingersoll
2a08528 If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake them before he is decrepit. intellect George Eliot
d7b3f7e He is the same soul. You are simply seeing another aspect of him. There is a secret core in everyone that not even Gabriel can know by trying to know. Listen now. The intellect derives from the senses, which are limited, and come from the body. The intellect therefore is also limited, and it can never truly know reality, which is infinite and eternal. Khalid wanted to know reality with his intellect, and he can't. Now he knows that, and is downcast. Intellect has no real mettle, you see, and at the first threat, into a hole it scuttles. But love is divine. It comes from the realm of the infinite, and is entrusted to the heart as a gift from God. Love has no calculation in it. 'God loves you' is the only possible sentence! So it's love you must follow to the heart of your father-in-law. Love is the pearl of an oyster living in the ocean, and intellect lives on the shore and cannot swim. Bring up the oyster, sew the pearl onto your sleeve for all to see. It will bring courage to the intellect. Love is the king that must rescue his coward slave. love intellect Kim Stanley Robinson
b14d8f4 I understand you well. Now we have no need to dispute: you are awake, and so you have seen the difference between us, the difference between men akin to their father and those who take their destiny from a woman; the difference between spirit and intellect. spirit narziss intellect Hermann Hesse
7e73c1b Then, as though he had suddenly become exhausted-or, rather, depleted by the demands made on him by a world greedy for the fruit of his intellect-he began to massage the side of his face with the flat of his hand, removing, with unconscious crassness, a bit of sleep from one eye. zooey intellect J.D. Salinger
f06c345 "I could never, I knew then, lose myself "in love." Margery had accused me of coldness, and she was right, but she was also wrong: For me, for always, the paramount organ of passion was the mind. Unnatural, unbalanced, perhaps, but it was true: Without intellect, there could be no love." passion independence romance feminist love feminist-quotes sherlock intellect mystery Laurie R. King
c49a9be Thinking he knows can be a trap. An ex-professor once told him he had a diamond-hard intellect and he'd been flattered at the time. Now he considers the nature of diamonds. Although sharp and glittering and useful for cutting glass, they shine with reflected light only. They're no use at all in the dark ego intellect Margaret Atwood
7b5df7e By all kinds of traps and sign-boards, threatening the extreme penalty of the divine law, exclude such trespassers from the only ground which can be sacred to you. It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember! If I am to be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain-brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town-sewers. There is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. There is the profane and stale revelation of the bar-room and the police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both communications. Only the character of the hearer determines to which it shall be open, and to which closed. I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality. Our very intellect shall be macadamized, as it were,--its foundation broken into fragments for the wheels of travel to roll over; and if you would know what will make for the most durable pavement, surpassing rolled stones, spruce blocks, and asphaltum, you have only to look into some of our minds which have been subjected to this treatment so long. mind thoughts meaning trivia gossip thinking intellect Henry David Thoreau
548365c The danger we face does not come from religion. It comes from a growing intellectual bankruptcy that is one of the symptoms of a dying culture. In ancient Rome, as the republic disintegrated and the Caesars were deified, as the Roman Senate became little more than an echo chamber of the emperor, the population's attention was diverted by a series of frontier wars and violent and elaborate spectacles in the arena. The excitement of entertainment consumed ancient Rome's emotional and intellectual life. It poisoned civic and political discourse. Social critics no longer had a form in which to speak. They were answered with ridicule and rage. It was not prerogative of the citizen to think. politics religion memes intellect rome Chris Hedges
9dc2c37 The same virtues, in the end, the same virtue (love), are required throughout, and fantasy (self) can prevent us from seeing a blade of grass just as it can prevent us from seeing another person. An increasing awareness of 'goods' and the attempt (usually only partially successful) to attend to them purely, without self, brings with it an increasing awareness of the unity and interdependence of the moral world. One-seeking intelligence is the image of faith. unity illusion good fantasy love self vision intellect Iris Murdoch
cef3923 The author perceives nuances of Abigail Adams' character in the occasional errors she makes in readily quoting John Milton. Rather than giving the observer a reason to quibble, they are evidence that she had absorbed Milton's works enough to feel comfortable quoting them from memory. openness perspective perception intellect David McCullough
606252a The infinite! No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man; no other idea has so fruitfully stimulated his intellect; yet no other concept stands in greater need of clarification than that of the infinite. world infinity intellect question math Simon Singh
b9de32a But a certain dullness of mind seems an almost necessary qualification, if not for every public man, at least for every one seriously engaged in making money. businessmen intellect Fyodor Dostoyevsky
29b7067 "The most perfect and satisfactory knowledge is that of perception but this is limited to the absolutely particular, to the individual. The comprehension of the many and the various into *one* representation is possible only through the *concept*, in other words, by omitting the differences; consequently, the concept is a very imperfect way of representing things. The particular, of course, can also be apprehended immediately as a universal, namely when it is raised to the (Platonic) *Idea*; but in this process, which I have analysed in the third book, the intellect passes beyond the limits of individuality and therefore of time; moreover, this is only an exception. These inner and essential imperfections of the intellect are further increased by a disturbance to some extent external to it but yet inevitable, namely, the influence that the *will* exerts on all its operations, as soon as that will is in any way concerned in their result. Every passion, in fact every inclination or disinclination, tinges the objects of knowledge with its colour. Most common of occurrence is the falsification of knowledge brought about by desire and hope, since they show us the scarcely possible in dazzling colours as probable and well-nigh certain, and render us almost incapable of comprehending what is opposed to it. Fear acts in a similar way; every preconceived opinion, every partiality, and, as I have said, every interest, every emotion, and every predilection of the will act in an analogous manner. philosophy schopenhauer ontology metaphysics intellect will Arthur Schopenhauer
de76b9e More personally, my intellect is a stumbling block to much that makes life worth living: laughter, love; a wiling acceptance of being created. The rational intellect doesn't have a great deal to do with love, and it doesn't have a great deal to do with art. love rationalism intellectualism intellect Madeleine L'Engle
165f8ff His cumbersome mind clung to an obscure ideal, shared by many people of limited intellect and venerated with unthinking respect: to let a branch sprout from the main trunk, an extension of himself. parenting intellect Hermann Hesse
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