Top 100 Being Intellectual Quotes
#1. I'm not interested in the fact that a writer may label himself as being intellectual or anti-intellectual. l'm really interested in the stuff he's turning out.
Jorge Luis Borges
#2. Occasionally, you will be given the chance to be either intellectual or pleasant. Leave being intellectual to others.
Ernie J Zelinski
#3. The three most difficult things for a human being are not physical feats or intellectual achievements. They are, first, returning love for hate; second, including the excluded; third, admitting that you are wrong.
Anthony De Mello
#4. [On being asked how many Mrs. Thatchers there were:] Oh, three at least. There is the intellectual one, the intuitive one and the one at home.
Margaret Thatcher
#5. In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity
or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity
by being opinionated rather than by being learned.
A. N. Wilson
#6. In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.
Richard Holt Hutton
#7. When you're watching Psycho, there' s that moment when you have a visceral reaction to watching someone being stabbed. And then you have the intellectual revelation that you're not, and that's where the celebration comes in.
Penn Jillette
#8. There has never been a boy painter, nor can there be. The art requires a long apprenticeship, being mechanical, as well as intellectual.
John Constable
#9. The proper motto is not Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever, but Be good sweet maid, and don't forget that this involves being as clever as you can. God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than any other slackers.
C.S. Lewis
#10. I guess I'm interested in people who are very sophisticated in intellectual ways, while being completely off the mark in emotional ones, with these huge blind spots in terms of their own behavior.
Noah Baumbach
#11. I loved Woody Allen's short pieces. I was equally influenced by Woody Allen and Norman Mailer. I was very into this idea of being high-low, of being serious and intellectual but also making really broad jokes.
Meghan Daum
#12. Scepticism is never certain of itself, being less a firm intellectual position than a pose to justify bad behavior.
Fulton J. Sheen
#13. There's something about being cerebral, intellectual, and yet emotionally repressed [in being villain]. If you think someone's doing this [bad] stuff and they're in complete control, that's more scary than if they're out of control.
Tom Hooper
#14. The mind serves best when it's anchored in the Word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity ...
Flannery O'Connor
#15. The deepest insult which can be shown to a human being is to associate it solely with material functions, with no cognizance and no consideration of its intellectual and spiritual power.
Mary C. Ames
#16. Unusually for an Indian man of his generation, my father, being aware of my mother's intellectual abilities, encouraged her to go abroad by herself to obtain a Ph.D.
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
#17. Intellectual work is essentially a lonely process, and if you can find a way of doing something so that you're in company without being disturbed, that, for me, is the critical thing. I often get to feel isolated so often if I'm sitting either where there aren't people or isn't a view.
Whitfield Diffie
#18. Nothing but an imperious intellectual and moral necessity can drive into doubt a religious mind, for it is as though an earthquake shook the foundations of the soul, and the very being quivers and sways under the shock.
Annie Besant
#19. A body of work, therefore, reveals the intellectual and emotional progress of the writer, and is a map of his soul. It's both terrifying and liberating to consider this aspect of being a novelist.
Dean Koontz
#20. It does not just happen. It is disclosed by science that practically one-half of trained intellectual resources are being mobilized for murderous purposes.
Alva Myrdal
#21. Research suggests that exposure to the natural world - including nearby nature in cities - helps improve human health, well-being, and intellectual capacity in ways that science is only recently beginning to understand.
Richard Louv
#22. Past and future monopolize the poet's sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.
Andre Breton
#23. As in intellectual error, so in evil of any other form, its essence is impermanence, for it cannot accord with the whole. Every moment it is being corrected by the totality of things and keeps changing its aspect.
Rabindranath Tagore
#24. No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.
Booker T. Washington
#25. I'm just being myself. I'm not a very complex guy; I'm not a very studious, crazy intellectual guy. I'm just a guy.
Mac DeMarco
#26. It wasn't easy to learn about Gustave LeBon. For being the father of such an enduring theory, almost nothing has been written about him. Only one man has ever tried to piece his life story together - Bob Nye, a professor of European intellectual history at Oregon State University.
Jon Ronson
#27. I couldn't stand being identified by my sexuality, I retaliated by insisting that people regard me for my intellectual worth. My intellect became a form of damage control.
Leora Tanenbaum
#28. A true intellectual is a man who, after reading a book and being convinced by its arguments, will shoot someone or, more likely, order someone shot.
John McCarthy
#29. The training is a set of interpersonal interactions that lead to emotional and intellectual experiences that provide a circumstance and an intrument for self awareness, self observation and reflection on the circumstances of the subject trainee, both in his individual life and as a social being.
Humberto Maturana
#31. It might seem that being a genius is a golden ticket to a life of glamorous soirees with the intellectual elite, champagne flute in hand, arm candy at your side, surrounded by a throng of smiling sycophants. But you might be confusing this scene with the lifestyle of a diplomat
Andre De Guillaume
#32. I went to the University of California, Santa Cruz for a year, which turned out to be a really vibrant, very intensive intellectual atmosphere where you could do a lot of aspect of music without it being a conservatory. And that's why I went there.
Tod Machover
#33. Language as a real thing is not imitation either of sounds or colors or emotions it is an intellectual recreation and there is nopossible doubt about it and it is going to go on being that as long as humanity is anything.
Gertrude Stein
#34. The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.
Manuel Puig
#35. Persons of slender intellectual stamina dread competition, as dwarfs are afraid of being run over in the street.
William Hazlitt
#36. All good things require effort. That which is worth having will cost part of your physical being, your intellectual power and your soul power. Let us ever keep in mind that life is largely what we make it.
David O. McKay
#37. Yoga is more than physical. It is cellular, mental, intellectual and spiritual-it involves man in his entire being
B.K.S. Iyengar
#38. Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It's something you accept, condone, and learn to believe you deserve.
Lena Dunham
#39. Actually, I've never thought myself as being a particularly hard worker. I've always worked, and I guess my mind is busy all the time. I've been in a lot of things just because of my own intellectual curiosity.
Sam Wyly
#40. Again, I don't fully understand my emotion response to the library or trust it. It was the site of a series of intellectual revelations that were crucial to me, not just as a student but as a human being.
Siri Hustvedt
#41. Human as an intellectual being needs answers about the existence for the purpose of knowing the way to live.
Zaman Ali
#42. Let us return to Jesus' prayer that, through the unity of the disciples, the world may recognize him as the one sent by the Father. This recognizing and believing is not something merely intellectual; it is about being touched by God's love and therefore changed; it is about the gift of true life.
Pope Benedict XVI
#43. [T]he source of everything respectable in man either as an intellectual or as a moral being namely, that his errors are corrigible.
John Stuart Mill
#44. Not the most beautiful, or artistic, or intellectual of cities in Italy, Ascoli Piceno is certainly one of the most easy going and affable, good to look at without being awesome. It is energetic and worldly, and it eats well.
Kate Simon
#45. To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.
Chinua Achebe
#46. For instead of being "the ardent pursuer of science" that some imagined, Jefferson was the captive of ambition, and ambition, Adams told John Quincy, was "the subtlest beast of the intellectual and moral field . . . [and] wonderfully adroit in concealing itself from its owner.
David McCullough
#47. If there is one subject in this world worthy of being discussed, worthy of being understood, it is the question of intellectual liberty. Without that, we are simply painted clay.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#48. But a huge part of being a writer is discovering your own intellectual and aesthetic autonomy, and how you best get the best words onto the page.
Paul Harding
#49. A history-stopping archetype is being released into the skies of this planet, and if we are not careful it will halt all intellectual inquiry in the same way that the Christos archetype halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic Age.
Terence McKenna
#50. I see Lord Buddha doing to our collective spiritual well-being what global trade did to our collective economic well-being and the digital internet did to our collective intellectual well-being.
Narendra Modi
#51. Man is an intellectual animal, and therefore an everlasting contradiction to himself. His senses centre in himself, his ideas reach to the ends of the universe; so that he is torn in pieces between the two, without a possibility of its ever being otherwise.
William Hazlitt
#52. I remember being very smart, which is a form of stupidity. I try not to remember it, but it occurs to me that I may have felt intellectual. I entertained views too noble or too bitter to be true. I must have done some soul-stretching of my mental neck.
Corra May Harris
#53. We are still barely conscious of how harmful it is to treat children in a degrading manner. Treating them with respect and recognizing the consequences of their being humiliated are by no means intellectual matters; otherwise, their importance would long since have been generally recognized.
Alice Miller
#54. There was a time I was no longer going to be black. I was going to be an 'intellectual.' When I was first looking around for colleges, thinking of colleges I couldn't afford to go to, I was thinking of being a philosopher. I began to understand then that much of my feelings about race were negative.
Walter Dean Myers
#55. Being is presented as the foundation of all that 'there is', and Life presupposes Being, just like Wisdom or any intellectual activity 20 presupposes Life
Anonymous
#56. How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be American before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?
Edith Wharton
#57. It's very lonely being a prominent black intellectual at an institution where you're the only prominent black intellectual. That was the model that was followed in the late 60s when black studies started. You'd get one here and one there and one here, like Johnny Appleseed.
Henry Louis Gates
#58. In these days of intellectual awakening and steadily asserting public opinion, the holy places of the Hindus, their condition, and method of work have not escaped tile keen eye of criticism; and this city, being the holy of holies to all Hindus, has not failed to attract its full share of censure.
Swami Vivekananda
#59. The more a human being in his worldview approaches the goal, the hegemony of love in a moral universe, the more has he become slipshod in the light of intellectual honesty.
Peter Wessel Zapffe
#60. Nonsense which it would be shameful for a reasonable being to write, speak or hear spoken can be sung or listened to by that same rational being with pleasure and even with a kind of intellectual conviction.
Aldous Huxley
#61. Voting in particular is an embarrassment, being a public display of weak character and low intelligence. Let us face the truth: Democracy, like spitting in public or the Roman games, is the proper activity of the lower intellectual and moral classes. It amounts to collusion in one's own suckering.
Fred Reed
#62. Either the human being must suffer and struggle as the price of a more searching vision, or his gaze must be shallow and without intellectual revelation.
Thomas De Quincey
#63. Just for being a religion at all you're as complicit as the rest in the retardation of the human intellectual progress.
Doug Stanhope
#64. Freedom would mean rest, artistic achievement, the intellectual fulfilment of my being.
Pessoa, Fernando
#65. NVC shows us a way of being very honest, but without any criticism, insults, or putdowns, and without any intellectual diagnosis implying wrongness.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
#66. Communism and fascism or nazism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority.
James A.C. Brown
#67. Every young writer, I imagine, has their first intellectual magazine, whose essays and articles are devoured all the more greedily for being slightly over one's head. Mine was First Things.
Ross Douthat
#68. Intellectual capacity is no guarantee against being dead wrong.
Carl Sagan
#69. To articulate who I hope will pick up this book and take a read: I imagine it being those who find themselves living in the tension between intellectual pursuit and passionate action. Neither
Bruce Reyes-Chow
#71. I'm a schoolteacher. That's even worse than being an intellectual. Schoolteachers are not only comic, they're often cold and hungry in this richest land on earth.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
#72. Mental ghettos are not mirages; they actually exist in palpable reality: being "open" inside one's mental or intellectual ghetto does not open its door but simply allows one to harbour the illusion that there is no ghetto and no door. The most dangerous prisons are those with invisible bars.
Tariq Ramadan
#73. Being able to provoke a different point of view to the standard current ideological or political perspective as played out in conventional newspaper or radio reportage is what a public intellectual does. But it's not merely about being oppositional, because that's too negative.
Susie Orbach
#74. The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we're doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce.
Tom Robbins
#75. She [Justice Sandra Day O'Connor], unlike, Judge Bork, did not think that being on the court would be an "intellectual feast," to quote Judge [Robert Heron] Bork.
Joe Biden
#76. Living for oneself is a bad thing. The keenest intellectual pleasure comes from being able to return to the self after being absent from it for a spell. But living all the time inside the self, that most tyrannical, demanding and capricious of companions - no, one shouldn't do it.
George Sand
#77. ORU is a daring new concept in higher education. It was planned to be from the beginning, one that would be able and willing to innovate change in all three basic aspects of your being - the intellectual, the physical and the spiritual.
Oral Roberts
#78. Instead of sniping at her like Mrs. Mi, Mrs. Ting let my mother do all sorts of things she wanted, like reading novels: before, reading a book without a Marxist cover would bring down a rain of criticism about being a bourgeois intellectual.
Jung Chang
#79. Steve Martin is one of the most intelligent, well-read human beings that I've ever come across. He is equally as funny off screen as he is on. But he also has a very intellectual side, and he's a really nice human being. We actually become good friends.
Anthony LaPaglia
#80. Because God is a rational being and the universe is his personal creation, it necessarily has a rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting increased human comprehension. This is the key to many intellectual undertakings, among them, the rise of science.
Rodney Stark
#81. I'm an ambitious person, and Harvard makes me feel successful, just having gotten in here. That's the ugly side of why I'm proud of being at Harvard Law School. Another reason is because there's a spirit of serious intellectual endeavor here.
Scott Turow
#82. The human race may be divided into people who love cats and people who hate them; the neutrals being few in numbers, and, for intellectual and moral reasons, not worth considering.
Agnes Repplier
#83. I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing.
Richard Rorty
#84. To ask for a purely intellectual proof of the existence of God is like asking for the privilege of being able to see with your ears!
Meher Baba
#85. The means of effective communication are being expropriated from the intellectual worker.
C. Wright Mills
#86. I believe that we learn by practice ... it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which come shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit.
Martha Graham
#87. Being daunted by her father in every intellectual attempt, she read every book that came in her way, almost with as much delight as if it had been forbidden.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#88. When we doubt our minds, we tend to discount its products. If we fear intellectual self-assertiveness, perhaps associating it with loss of love, we mute our intelligence. We dread being visible; so we make ourselves invisible, then suffer because no one sees us.
Nathaniel Branden
#89. Sports and entertainment are the only places where inner-city kids see themselves being able to succeed. Their intellectual development is something they don't relate to.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
#90. There is no study in the world which brings into more harmonious action all the faculties of the mind than [mathematics], ... or, like this, seems to raise them, by successive steps of initiation, to higher and higher states of conscious intellectual being ...
James Joseph Sylvester
#91. Stealing music is not right, and I can understand people being very upset about their intellectual property being stolen.
Steve Jobs
#92. And some of the people i knew were contemplating our circumstances. our circumstances being poorly paid jobs if we worked in the arts, two hours of sleep if we worked in money, and a newfound sense of intellectual inferiority if we worked in publishing.
Sloane Crosley
#93. I would like to attribute my range of interests to being an independent intellectual, but although I'm independent, I'm not sure I qualify as an intellectual. Basically, I'm an old-fashioned amateur.
Anne Fadiman
#94. It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another ... we consider those, where the intellectual faculties most developed as the highest. - A bee doubtless would [use] ... instincts as a criteria.
Charles Darwin
#95. The business of both parent and teacher is to enable and to help the child to educate himself, to develop his own intellectual, moral, aesthetic and practical capacities and to grow freely as an organic being, not to be kneaded and pressured into form like an inert plastic material
Sri Aurobindo
#96. I too had thoughts once of being an intellectual, but I found it too difficult.
Albert Schweitzer
#97. What we call the freedom of the individual is not just the luxury of one intellectual to write what he likes to write but his being a voice which can speak for those who are silent.
Stephen Spender
#98. My mom told me as a youngster I was always intellectual, like as far as being able to adapt fast and quick. But I had a fun childhood, went to regular school.
Chris Brown
#99. Since it is seldom clear whether intellectual activity denotes a superior mode of being or a vital deficiency, opinion swings between considering intellect a privilege and seeing it as a handicap
Jacques Barzun
#100. Analytical philosophy was very interesting. It always struck me as being very interesting and full of tremendous intellectual curiosities. It is wonderful to see the mind at work in such an
intense manner, but, for me, it was still too far removed from my own issues.
Joseph Conrad
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