Top 97 Great Intellectual Quotes
#1. One problem with the focus on speculation is that it tends to promote the growth of the great intellectual cancer of our times: conspiracy theories.
Gary Weiss
#2. It was at the graduate school at Columbia University that I first met Wesley C. Mitchell, with whom I was associated for many years at the National Bureau of Economic Research and to whom I owe a great intellectual debt.
Simon Kuznets
#3. I think there's too much mixing fashion and intellect. Fashion ultimately is designed to cover the human body, to give you joy, to make you feel better. I don't think it has to have a great intellectual meaning.
Suzy Menkes
#4. This was a time of great intellectual excitement for me. Both college and law school opened up new worlds of ideas.
Samuel Alito
#5. It is extraordinary the extent to which Darwin's insights not only changed his contemporaries' view of the world but also continue to be a source of great intellectual stimulation for scientists and nonscientists alike.
James D. Watson
#6. One of the great intellectual failures of the American intelligence community, and especially the counterterrorism community, is to assume if someone hasn't attacked us, it's because he can't or because we've defeated him.
Michael Scheuer
#7. The men of sense, the idols of the shallow, are very inferior to the men of passions. It is the strong passions which, rescuing us from sloth, impart to us that continuous and earnest attention necessary to great intellectual efforts.
Claude Adrien Helvetius
#8. We are all racing towards death. No matter how many great, intellectual conclusions we draw during our lives, we know they're all only man-made, like God. I begin to wonder where it all leads. What can you do, except do what you can do as best you know how.
John Hurt
#9. General theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. They are the great intellectual achievements of the first half of this century.
Stephen Hawking
#10. My parents lived a modest life, and their main concern was the education of their children. My father was a self-taught man but had a great intellectual curiosity, not only for biblical and talmudic texts, but also for philosophy, psychoanalysis and history.
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
#12. Whether or not it is ultimately the best of all conceivable scripts for Korean, Hangeul must unquestionably rank as one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind.
Geoffrey Sampson
#13. You never observe a great intellectual movement in Europe in which the
Jews do NOT greatly participate. The first Jesuits were Jews.
Benjamin Disraeli
#14. The discovery that the universe was expanding was one of the great intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century.
Stephen Hawking
#15. It is impossible to remain indifferent to Japanese culture. It is a different civilisation where all you have learnt must be forgotten. It is a great intellectual challenge and a gorgeous sensual experience.
Alain Ducasse
#16. In this denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world.
Frederick Douglass
#17. My father is an intellectual and physical man, which is a rather unusual combination. He's great. As he brought up me and my brothers and sisters, he ingrained in us that your appearance is not your responsibility, other than that you should not be a slob.
Christopher Reeve
#18. No leader, however great a personality he may be, is as important to a people as their own intellectual development.
George William Russell
#19. Canada is either an idea or it does not exist. It is either an intellectual undertaking or it is little more than a resource-rich vacuum lying in the buffer zone just north of a great empire.
John Ralston Saul
#20. As much as there are intellectual choices to be made and all the rest of it, a great actor has the ability really, to disappear and lose themself in a kind of mystical fashion. My appreciation and fascination with true acting is really all over the book, definitely.
Rebecca Miller
#21. Rosa Luxemburg was - still is for me - a great personal and intellectual heroine. Her analysis of Leninism and capitalism and social democracy are all worth reading. I wouldn't consider anyone truly politically literate if they hadn't given her work at least some study.
Christopher Hitchens
#22. The difference between a pessimistic and an optimistic mind is of such controlling importance in regard to every intellectual function, and especially for the conduct of life, that it is out of the question to admit that both are normal, and the great majority of mankind are naturally optimistic.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#23. Among those who are satisfactory in this respect it is desirable to have represented as great a diversity of intellectual tradition, social milieu and personal character as possible.
Talcott Parsons
#24. The intellectual process must be stirred. A feeling for knowledge for its own sake must be engendered. Learning will then be an exciting adventure which few can escape, nor will many wish to. And it will bring the spirit to a great awakening which can likely last a lifetime.
Julius Sumner Miller
#25. The intellectual architecture means focusing on doing great work instead of focusing on agency politics.
Jay Chiat
#26. What is more absurd and more impious than to attribute the name of Lucifer to the devil, that is, to personified evil. The intellectual Lucifer is the spirit of intelligence and love; it is the paraclete, it is the Holy Spirit, while the physical Lucifer is the great agent of universal magnetism.
Eliphas Levi
#27. Great causes cannot be served by intellectual equipment alone, they call for spiritual effort of soul-force.
Mahatma Gandhi
#29. Laughter is one of the great beacons in life because we don't refract it by gunning it through our intellectual prism. What makes us laugh is a mystery - an involuntary response.
Dennis Miller
#30. Civilized people can talk about anything. For them no subject is taboo ... In civilized societies there will be no intellectual bogeys at sight of which great grownup babies are expected to hide their eyes.
Clive Bell
#31. I need three million dollars to make a low-budget, intellectual, artistic, exciting, erotic movie with a great soundtrack.
Ray Manzarek
#32. If we ever do find a complete theory of the universe, it would be a great triumph of human reason but it wouldn't leave much for us to do. We need an intellectual challenge.
Stephen Hawking
#33. As man under pressure tends to give in to physical and intellectual weakness, only great strength of will can lead to the objective.
Carl Von Clausewitz
#34. Where execution is dominant, as it is in the individual events of a war whether great or small, then intellectual factors are reduced to a minimum.
Carl Von Clausewitz
#35. I find the workload of what I do sufficiently great that when the term of court starts, I undergo a sort of annual intellectual lobotomy.
David Souter
#36. A great deal of time and intellectual force are lost in the world, because the false seems great and the truth so small and insignificant.
Maria Montessori
#37. The intellectual, the moral, the religious seem to me all naturally bound up and interlinked together in one great and harmonious whole.
Ada Lovelace
#38. Elegance? It may seem odd to non-scientists, but there is an aesthetic in software as there is in every other area of intellectual endeavour. Truly great programmers are like great poets or great mathematicians - they can achieve in a few lines what lesser mortals can only approach in three volumes
John Naughton
#39. The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
George Santayana
#40. I found university a little dispiriting. I thought I would enter the great halls of Plato, but instead I entered the halls of an intellectual sausage factory. I wanted to do something not on the main course, and chose the environment.
Bjorn Lomborg
#41. Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used, not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aid them to judge for themselves.
William Ellery Channing
#42. Nothing is finer for the purposes of great productions than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers.
John Keats
#43. As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.
Sigmund Freud
#44. Great art is always a balancing act. But all art has both - an emotional content and an intellectual content.
George L. Carlson
#45. All great work - artistic, poetic, intellectual or spiritual - is produced at those moments when its creators are lost completely in their actions, when they forget themselves altogether, and are free from self-consciousness.
Walpola Rahula
#46. Next to the intellectual stimulation of chess, the educational value is of great importance. Chess teaches logic, imagination, self-discipline, and determination.
Garry Kasparov
#47. Fancy, an animal faculty, is very different from imagination, which is intellectual. The former is passive; but the latter is active and creative. Children, the weak minded, and the timid are full of fancy. Men and women of intellect, of great intellect, are alone possessed of great imagination.
Joseph Joubert
#48. Nearly all people stand in great horror of annihilation, and yet to give up your individuality is to annihilate yourself. Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#49. 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
#50. Walking along the avenues, we had one of the so-called intellectual conversations, which consist a great deal in quoting names of books and authors.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#51. The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.
Soren Kierkegaard
#52. My professional apprenticeship at Iowa State College from 1930 to 1943 could not have been better; the Great Depression made it so, and the talented younger economists at Ames during that period made it an exciting and profitable intellectual experience.
Theodore Schultz
#53. Political change and academic change and intellectual change are obviously crucial, but they don't necessarily change society. They can change a particular class and give everybody in that class great arguments, but that doesn't necessarily translate into the body of the culture.
Eve Ensler
#54. Intellectual intelligence +creative intelligence + emotional intelligence = Great intelligence
Matshona Dhliwayo
#55. My great project is to undo the moral and intellectual damage of most universities
Dennis Prager
#56. It's important to celebrate the monogram. It's the DNA of Vuitton. I think - I hope - there is an interest in the philosophy and culture of the Vuitton name. It's quite coherent and intellectual, and the products are great. These are things you will want to pass on - things you treasure.
Delphine Arnault
#57. 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
#58. The thing which Reagan did, which was great, was he won the people. He marginalized the media. And that's what you need, an intellectual agility.
Greg Gutfeld
#59. When the interval between the intellectual classes and the practical classes is too great, the former will possess no influence, the latter will reap no benefit.
Henry Thomas Buckle
#60. Highest love of God is not intellectual, it is spiritual. God is spirit and only the spirit of man can know Him really. In the deep spirit of a man, the fire must glow, or his love is not the true love of God. The great ones of the kingdom have been those who loved God more than others did.
A.W. Tozer
#61. Learning to read, and to a lesser degree, to write, are of course the major events in one's intellectual development. There is nothing to compare with it, since very few people (Helen Keller is the great exception) can remember what it meant for them to learn to speak.
Karl Popper
#63. There are big men, men of intellect, intellectual men, men of talent and men of action; but the great man is difficult to find, and it needs
apart from discernment
a certain greatness to find him.
Margot Asquith
#64. To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#65. I didn't even have a clear idea of why I wanted to go to Oxford - apart from the fact I had fallen in love with the architecture. It certainly wasn't out of some great sense of academic or intellectual achievement. In many ways, my education only began after I'd left university.
Alan Bennett
#66. If religious belief be indeed so necessary to mankind, as we are continually assured that it is, there is great reason to lament, that the intellectual grounds of it should require to be backed by moral bribery or subornation of the understanding.
John Stuart Mill
#67. Great art would have 'head': it would have interesting intellectual ideas and concepts. It would have 'heart' in that it would have passion and heart and soul. And it would have 'hand' in that it would be greatly crafted.
Shea Hembrey
#68. Yes, I am positive that one of the great curatives of our evils, our maladies, social, moral, and intellectual, would be a return to the soil, a rehabilitation of the work of the fields.
Charles Wagner
#69. A lot of Christian extremism has done a great deal to discredit religion; the main religious traditions have abandoned their own intellectual cultures so drastically that no one has any sense of it other than the fringe.
Marilynne Robinson
#70. Long, long ago, my great mentor in graduate school, the late Darb, he said if you're writing for a popular audience, you do not start by saying, 'Consider a small, open economy..' You say, 'In Belgium.
Paul Krugman
#71. These descendants divined myths in what was really history, for true memories were forgotten in chaos as vast arrays of daivi astras used in the Great War ravaged the land. That war destroyed almost everything. It took centuries for India to regain its old cultural vigour and intellectual depth.
Amish Tripathi
#72. Consistency and an established worldview were excess baggage in the intellectual mobile warfare that flared up in the mass media's tiny time segments, and it was his great advantage to be free of such things.
Haruki Murakami
#73. The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.
Stephen King
#74. A stable social system is necessary, but every stable system hitherto devised has hampered the development of exceptional artistic or intellectual merit. How much murder and anarchy are we prepared to endure for the sake of great achievements such as those of the Renaissance?
Bertrand Russell
#75. I need a challenge. I need the intellectual stimulation. I'm a member of a community on each film, working in concert to try to bring an idea to life. It's a great job.
Harrison Ford
#76. Thought breeds thought; children familiar with great thoughts take as naturally to thinking for themselves as the well-nourished body takes to growing; and we must bear in mind that growth, physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual, is the sole end of education.
Charlotte M. Mason
#77. Intelligence, integrity and courage are the great pillars that support the State. Above all, the citizens of a free nation should honor the brave and independent man - the man of stainless integrity, of will and intellectual force.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#78. From the intellectual point of view an abyss may exist between a great mathematician and his boot maker, but from the point of view of character the difference is most often slight or non-existent
Gustave Le Bon
#79. When you go to a great concert, you feel this arc, almost like the music of a well-chosen set takes you on this trip through emotions and through various forms of intellectual engagement.
John Green
#80. Deal honestly and objectively with yourself; intellectual honesty and personal courage are the hallmarks of great character.
Brian Tracy
#81. It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when an elite minority was enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s.
Naomi Klein
#82. I was very much influenced by a great book by the scholar Neil Richards called Intellectual Privacy, that [Louis] Brandeis changed his mind on the proper balance between dignity and free speech.
Jeffrey Rosen
#83. There's nothing like the discovery of an unknown work by a great thinker to set the intellectual community atwitter and cause academics to dart about like those things one sees when looking at a drop of water under a microscope.
Woody Allen
#84. That the sweetly intoxicating three-four rhythm which took hold of hand & foot, necessarily eclipsed great & serious music & made the audience unfit for any intellectual effort goes without saying.
Eduard Hanslick
#85. Intellectual discourse and investigation is admittedly great fun but only truly meaningful when conducted in the service of others.
Sergio De La Pava
#86. A great deal of intellectual intelligence depends on emotional intelligence.
Michael Gurian
#87. However great an intellectual may be, however great one may be as a scholar or a man of learning, one has also to acquire humanness. Without humanness, scholarship and intellectual eminence are of no value.
Sathya Sai Baba
#88. I identify with my culture, but I am happy to be living on a tolerant, intellectual island where I can deal with Dostoyevsky and Sartre, both great influences for me.
Orhan Pamuk
#89. Parts are not to be examined till the whole has been surveyed; there is a kind of intellectual remoteness necessary for the comprehension of any great work in its full design and its true proportions; a close approach shews the smaller niceties, but the beauty of the whole is discerned no longer.
Samuel Johnson
#90. If you have somebody who's brilliant and highly creative with a different point of view than you have, and a very different intellectual background, great things can happen.
Kip Thorne
#91. Although I was not aware of it at the time, the experience of growing up during the Great Depression was to have a profound impact on my intellectual and professional career.
Lawrence R. Klein
#92. The young women, what can they not learn, what can they not achieve, with Columbia University annex thrown open to them? In this great outlook for women's broader intellectual development I see the great sunburst of the future.
M. E. W. Sherwood
#93. One of the great things about songwrighting; it's not an intellectual experience
Keith Richards
#94. Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.
Samuel Johnson
#95. Ralph Miliband was a socialist intellectual of great integrity. He belonged to a generation of socialists formed by the Russian revolution and the Second World War, a generation that dominated left-wing politics for almost a century.
Tariq Ali
#96. A great thing would be done if all these God-visions could embrace and cast themselves into each other; but intellectual dogma and cult egoism stand in the way.
Sri Aurobindo
#97. Woman's great mission is to train immature, weak and ignorant creatures to obey the laws of God; the physical, the intellectual, the social and the moral.
Catharine Beecher
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