Top 82 Good Intellectual Quotes
#1. There is far too much of the feeding-bottle in education and young people ought to be supplied with good intellectual food and then left to help themselves.
Thomas Huxley
#2. One of the things that characterizes good intellectual work is a certain self-importance.
Whitfield Diffie
#3. You're the nice, quiet alcoholic. The good intellectual alcoholic.
Caroline Knapp
#4. Observation and experiment for gathering material, induction and deduction for elaborating it: these are are only good intellectual tools.
Francis Bacon
#5. To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#6. I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon. Every man of good will is the enemy of society.
Marshall McLuhan
#7. What good is a theory of how the universe works if it's a series of tensor equations that, even when understood, come nowhere tangential to experience? The only intellectual or noetic or spiritual path worth following is one that builds on personal experience
Terence McKenna
#8. Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.
David Quammen
#9. There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.
Steven Pinker
#10. The ultimate design of the Mysteries ... was to lead us back to the principles from which we descended, ... a perfect enjoyment of intellectual [spiritual] good.
Plato
#11. No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.
Mark Helprin
#12. 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
#13. During intellectual droughts one shower of good ideas can cause a flash-flood to wash away the roads your habits travel.
Bryant McGill
#14. He must have been an incredibly good shot.
Noel Coward
#15. I am thoroughly sick of pearls. They make one look so plain, so good and so intellectual.
Oscar Wilde
#16. If creators of Christian culture hope to produce work that will bear good fruit, we must draw our life from the true source - our living Savior. He is real. He is present. But all too often we reduce him to an abstraction, giving him intellectual assent, but not our hearts.
Michael O'Brien
#17. I basically believe that until China stop stealing our intellectual property, and until they stop keeping our companies out that do good things, the amount we will gain from export jobs is minimized, and the amount we lose in middle class incomes is maximized.
Charles Schumer
#18. Established views have frequently emerged not through a process of faultless reasoning, but through centuries of intellectual muddle. There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.
Alain De Botton
#19. I set it down as a maxim, that it is good for a man to live where he can meet his betters, intellectual and social.
William Makepeace Thackeray
#20. 1. Quality land and natural resources 2. Intellectual property, or good ideas about what should be produced 3. Quality labor with unique skills
Tyler Cowen
#21. American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
George Santayana
#22. You're like candy. People lick your knowledge to become wise, lick your words from your powerful mouth and say it even better than you. Lick each step you make and stay on a good track, and once you're dead, the lickers scavenge for another intellectual candy.
Michael Bassey
#23. Men have such a good opinion of themselves, of their mental superiority and intellectual depth; they believe themselves so skilled in discerning the true from the false, the path of safety from those of error, that they should be forbidden as much as possible the perusal of philosophic writings.
Al-Ghazali
#24. We must understand that when a society undermines intellectual freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally bad, but when it represses biological freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally good.
Robert M. Pirsig
#25. Reading is the royal road to intellectual eminence ... Truly good books are more than mines to those who can understand them. They are the breathings of the great souls of past times. Genius is not embalmed in them, but lives in them perpetually.
William Ellery Channing
#26. If you want to be an athlete, then getting good grades, going to college, and developing your intellectual skills are important.
Tony Dungy
#27. None but a people advanced to a high state of moral and intellectual excellence are capable in a civilized condition of forming and maintaining free governments, and among those who are so far advanced, very few indeed have had the good fortune to form constitutions capable of endurance.
John C. Calhoun
#28. A person may be a moron or an imbecile if he is lacking in judgment; but with good judgment he can never be either. Indeed the rest of the intellectual faculties seem of little importance in comparison with judgment.
Alfred Binet
#29. 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
#30. Mankind never loses any good thing, physical, intellectual, or moral, till it finds a better, and then the loss is a gain. No steps backward is the rule of human history. What is gained by one man is invested in all men, and is a permanent investment for all time.
Theodore Parker
#31. To seek enlightenment, intellectual or spiritual; to do good; to love and be loved; to create and to teach: these are the highest purposes of humankind. If there is meaning in life, it lies here.
George Monbiot
#32. There is much of economic theory which is pursued for no better reason than its intellectual attraction; it is a good game. We have no reason to be ashamed of that, since the same would hold for many branches of mathematics.
Sir John Richard Hicks
#33. 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
#34. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature.
Ernest Hemingway,
#35. The high IQ has become the American equivalent of the Legion of Honor, positive proof of a child's intellectual aristocracy ... It has become more important to be a smart kid than a good kid or even a healthy kid.
Sam Levenson
#36. Old Luce. He was strictly a pain in the ass, but he certainly had a good vocabulary. He had the largest vocabulary of any boy at Whooton when I was there. They gave us a test.
J.D. Salinger
#37. Europeans are much more serious than we are in America because they think that a good place to discuss intellectual matters is a beer party.
Richard P. Feynman
#38. With all due respect, many in the entertainment industry are deep into mind-altering substance abuse, and when one's logic and intellectual calculating powers are replaced with dopey feel-good, fantasy-driven denial, the democratic party serves them well.
Ted Nugent
#39. I can think of no habit, kept up through the years, that binds a married couple more than that of reading good books together. Domestic problems and personal problems are for the time forgotten, and an intellectual intimacy is established that can be maintained in few other ways.
Alice Hegan Rice
#40. Marguerite Duras was a very good friend of mine and an intellectual hero. She was also a sort of mother figure. Of course she was an influence.
Claire Denis
#41. As an old man who remembers the intellectual exhilaration and the pleasure of having done good work that characterized the CIA when it was young, I wonder if it might not be better to speak and think in terms of restoring its culture.
Charles McCarry
#42. The teacher who would be true to his mission and accomplish the most good, must give prominence to moral as well as intellectual instruction.
Sheldon Jackson
#44. Although all the good arts serve to draw man's mind away from vices and lead it toward better things, this function can be more fully performed by this art, which also provides extraordinary intellectual pleasure.
Nicolaus Copernicus
#45. We need a childlike trust that God is good ... ultimately we are OK. That is a simple, beautiful pure thing that can be complicated ferociously by all sorts of intellectual categories.
Rob Bell
#46. Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.
Philip Pullman
#47. Good politicians need not be intellectuals, but they should have intellectual lives.
Gary Gutting
#48. A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible.
Freeman Dyson
#49. To lack faith perhaps isn't as much an intellectual disbelief in the existence of God as fear and distrust that there is a good God.
Ann Voskamp
#50. Today, we have more information than ever, but less wisdom; more talk, but less listening; more things in the superficial showroom (celebrities are a good example), and less in the intellectual storeroom (that would be knowledge).
Cal Thomas
#51. Intellectual beauty is sufficient unto itself, and only for it rather than for the future good of humanity does the scholar condemn himself to arduous and painful labors.
Santiago Ramon Y Cajal
#52. When [wines] were good they pleased my sense, cheered my spirits, improved my moral and intellectual powers, besides enabling me to confer the same benefits on other people. (Notes on a Cellar Book)
George Saintsbury
#53. Society is not merely a select body of spiritual or intellectual persons, but a great organism composed of all kinds of members, a net containing bad and good.
Robert Hugh Benson
#54. Escaping into the fantasy of intellectual investigation or narrative story telling makes me feel hopeful. That too is a fiction, but one that makes me feel good sometimes.
Andrew Neel
#55. America has always been torn between the ideal and the real, between noble goals and inevitable compromises. So was Jefferson. In his head and in his heart, as in the nation itself, the perfect warred with the good, the intellectual with the visceral.
Jon Meacham
#56. There is evidence for the deity of Jesus
good, strong,
historical , cumulative evidence; evidence to which an honest
person can subscribe without committing intellectual suicide.
John R.W. Stott
#57. The theory that holds "good blood" or "bad blood" as a moral-intellectual criterion , can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice.
Ayn Rand
#58. Then, moreover, the white locks of age were sometimes found to be the thatch of an intellectual tenement in good repair.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#59. Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without question.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#60. The good thing about Pro Tools is you can actually hear what you're working on, so it doesn't just become this intellectual idea. But Pro Tools can be dangerous, too. It can make things sterile.
Bjork
#61. If a solution fails to appear ... and yet we feel success is just around the corner, try resting for a while ... Like the early morning frost, this intellectual refreshment withers the parasitic and nasty vegetation that smothers the good seed. Bursting forth at last is the flower of truth.
Santiago Ramon Y Cajal
#62. And one thing the void certainly can teach us is how to wait, how to become truly patient, and how to let go of superfluous intellectual baggage - all of which is a good lesson for hyper-agitated multi-tasking goal-focussed contemporary human beings.
George Pattison
#63. I have spent a good part of my life showing what an intellectual bubble the Left lives in.
Dennis Prager
#64. Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.
Rollo May
#65. The core of science is not a mathematical modeling
it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.
Sam Harris
#66. Intellectuals tend to be arrogant. Intelligence, like money, is a good servant but a bad master. When practicing pranayama, the yogi [makes] himself humble and without pride in his intellectual attainments.
B.K.S. Iyengar
#67. Smell and taste are processed in parts of our brains that are reactive and emotional rather than intellectual, which is one reason developing a good vocabulary of aromas is so difficult. It's a long journey from our lizard brain way up to where language is processed.
Randy Mosher
#68. If partisanship makes us abandon intellectual honesty, if we oppose what our opponents say or do simply because they are the ones saying or doing it, we become mere political short-sellers, hoping for bad news because it's good for our ideological investment.
Kurt Andersen
#69. Every man naturally desires knowledge; but what good is knowledge without fear of God? Indeed a humble rustic who serves God is better than a proud intellectual who neglects his soul to study the course of the stars.
Thomas A Kempis
#70. One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.
In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#71. From the moral as from the intellectual point of view, the child is born neither good nor bad but master of his destiny.
Jean Piaget
#72. So I'm writing more highly personalized and intellectual music, and I think that's good. It might take longer to find me, but I think that niche is perhaps underserved, so I'm going to serve that.
Paula Cole
#73. 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
#74. I like to look good, but I like my body to function well more than anything. For me, it's as spiritual and intellectual as it is physical. And emotional. I'm a better husband, I'm a better father, if my body is physically functioning at the highest possible levels.
Willi Smith
#75. She tended to be impatient with that sort of intellectual who, for all his brilliance, has never been able to arrive at the simple conclusion that to be reasonably happy you have to be reasonably good.
Carolyn Kizer
#76. But is good to meet fellow intellectual," he continued. "I celebrate occasion with small drink. Unfortunate, I am impossibility to move."
"Why?"
"Because I find myself in sitting position.
Tom Rachman
#77. You don't have to be really good anymore to get good results. What's happening with Chess is that it's gradually losing its place as the par excellence of intellectual activity. Smart people in search of a challenging board game might try a game called Go.
Hans Berliner
#78. Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.
Werner Herzog
#79. Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all you want from a person - sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of them.
Hanya Yanagihara
#80. A good reliable set of bowels is worth more to a man than any quantity of brains.
Josh Billings
#81. At that moment in her life, Elisa was, he realized, almost pathologically attracted not to status or money or good looks but to literary and intellectual potential.
Adelle Waldman
#82. I'm an intellectual Thatcherite, just as I was an intellectual Powellite, and I think it important that the Conservative party should be in good hands and that it should win elections.
Maurice Cowling
