#tell

The mother was holding a baby, had a stroller with what looked like twin girls around three, and had a five-year-old boy who was running around the shelves with a finger shoved up his nose. I considered warning him that if he fell, he would poke his brain out, but it struck me that losing intelligence was not something he was worried about. ↗

— Eileen Cook

#dry-wit #family #intelligence #nose-picking #poke

[Janco] paused. His eyes held a distant gleam as if seeing into his past. 'My first practice was a shock. I was a cocky smart aleck--' [Opal] 'Was?' [J] 'Be quiet. I'm telling a story here. ↗

— Maria V. Snyder

#storytelling #humor

What struck me whenever I visited a farm was how much more sophisticated was the life the animals were capable of living than was assumed by those exploiting them. The more we are willing to see about their lives, the more we will see. Humans seem to take perverse pleasure in attributing stupidity to animals when it is almost always entirely a question of human ignorance. ↗

— Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

#ignorance #intelligence #food

Intelligence is the key to achieve your dreams. ↗

— Jennifer Lim

#intelligence #life #dreams

People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man like Paddy, with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such nonsense to pretend that those who have 'come down in the world' are to be pitied above all others. The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind. ↗

— George Orwell

#poverty #unemployment #education

Self-actualization is what educated existence is all about. For members of the educated class, life is one long graduate school. When they die, God meets them at the gates of heaven, totes up how many fields of self-expression they have mastered, and then hands them a divine diploma and lets them in. ↗

— David Brooks

#graduate-school #intellectualism #meritocracy #self-actualization #upper-class

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#hinduism #spiritual #intellect

Participating in class, doing your homework, and basically just having your shit together and doing what's got to be done shouldn't be seen as a lame move, it's extremely counterproductive to the fostering of our collective intelligence. ↗

— Joshua Neik

#education-system #intelligence #knowledge #wisdom #education

Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves. ↗

— Samuel Johnson

#equality #fear #gender #intelligence #men

A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#intelligence #irritability #marriage #matrimony #recklessness