#intellect

The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument. ↗

— Madeleine L'Engle

#intellect #science #faith

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life──the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within──can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances. ↗

— George Eliot

#freedom

The concept of reason itself appears as an artificial attempt to separate intellectual powers from the frustrations, emotions, and accidents which cause events; the concept of reason is viewed as facade to prevent change. ↗

— Edward Levi

#appears #artificial #attempt #cause #change

You make all the fashion statements just by dressing up your mind. ↗

— Jason Mraz

#humor #intellectual #humor

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. ↗

— John Milton

#censorship #ideas #intellect #life

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. ↗

— Isaac Asimov

#intellectual #political #willful-ignorance #life

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. ↗

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

#intellect #intelligent-design #reason #research #death

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life. ↗

— Charles Scribner, Jr.

#commonplace #cultivated #essential #everyday #everyday life

French intellectual life has, in my opinion, been turned into something cheap and meretricious by the 'star' system. It is like Hollywood. Thus we go from one absurdity to another - Stalinism, existentialism. Lacan, Derrida - some of them obscene ( Stalinism), some simply infantile and ridiculous ( Lacan, Derrida). What is striking, however, is the pomposity and self-importance, at each stage. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#french-intellectuals #lacan #sartre #life

If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake them before he is decrepit. ↗

— George Eliot

#intellect #life