#intellect

It's the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection. ↗

— Antonio Tabucchi

#doubt #intellectuals #job #perfection #writers

An intellectual is going to have doubts, for example, about a fundamentalist religious doctrine that admits no doubt, about an imposed political system that allows no doubt, about a perfect aesthetic that has no room for doubt. ↗

— Antonio Tabucchi

#aesthetic #allows #doctrine #doubt #doubts

Earlier in my life, I performed a lot of music. Some of it because I felt it was a demonstration, or a representation of certain intellectual concepts that were very exciting and important. ↗

— Michael Tilson Thomas

#certain #concepts #demonstration #earlier #exciting

The Geometer has the special privilege to carry out, by abstraction, all constructions by means of the intellect. Who, then, would wish to prevent me from freely considering figures hanging on a balance imagined to be at an infinite distance beyond the confines of the world? ↗

— Evangelista Torricelli

#balance #beyond #carry #confines #considering

The apostles were moved, not so much by an intellectual apprehension, as by a spiritual illumination. They met men, and the need of those men whom they met cried aloud to them. ↗

— Roland Allen

#apostles #apprehension #cried #illumination #intellectual

This intellectual Pearl Harbor, a real gutsy sock to the stomach. ↗

— J. Allen Hynek

#intellectual #pearl #pearl harbor #real #sock

In disposition the Negro is joyous, flexible, and indolent; while the many nations which compose this race present a singular diversity of intellectual character, of which the far extreme is the lowest grade of humanity. ↗

— Samuel George Morton

#compose #disposition #diversity #extreme #far

I was very intellectually oriented, very early on. ↗

— Donald Johanson

#i #intellectually #oriented #very

Intellectuals are useless, and as a pseudo-intellectual I can't help but envy the practicality of that. ↗

— Bauvard

#humor #pseuso-intellectuals #uselessness #funny

Perhaps the most dangerous by-product of the Age of Intellect is the unconscious growth of the idea that the human brain can solve the problems of the world. Even on the low level of practical affairs this is patently untrue. Any small human activity, the local bowls club or the ladies’ luncheon club, requires for its survival a measure of self-sacrifice and service on the part of the members. In a wider national sphere, the survival of the nation depends basically on the loyalty and self‑sacrifice of the citizens. The impression that the situation can be saved by mental cleverness, without unselfishness or human self-dedication, can only lead to collapse. ↗

— John Bagot Glubb

#history #intellectualism #sacrifice #service #age