Top 100 Intellectual Life Quotes
#1. Nations could not return to their settled an independent life again without noticing that they had unconsciously adopted, and come to feel here and there previously unrecognized spiritual and intellectual needs.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#2. In a sense,' Foucault concluded with a flourish, 'all the rest of my life I've been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys.
James Miller
#3. The life of a visual communicator should be one of systematic and exciting intellectual chaos.
Alberto Cairo
#4. 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
#5. The liberal professions, and in a wider sense the well-to-do classes, are certainly those with the liveliest taste for knowledge and the most active intellectual life.
Emile Durkheim
#6. I have spent a good part of my life showing what an intellectual bubble the Left lives in.
Dennis Prager
#7. The mistake consists in our splitting into two what is really and absolutely one. Is not life one as we live it, which we cut to pieces by recklessly applying the murderous knife of intellectual surgery?
D.T. Suzuki
#8. Most areas of intellectual life have discovered the virtues of speculation, and have embraced them wildly. In academia, speculation is usually dignified as theory.
Michael Crichton
#9. The insistence on the knowledge of intellectual mysteries, either as an indispensable addition to or as a substitute for simple obedience to the claims of the Christian life, has always been a weakness of the Church.
R.H. Charles
#10. I led the life of an intellectual up until a certain age. I remember Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams' was a big favorite when I was 11. It sounded so interesting. And it really was!
Wallace Shawn
#11. The Intellectual Transcending Equation In Life:
Occurrence Plus Perception Minus Materialistic
Reasoning Divided By Nothing Equals Spiritual
Progression, With A Remainder Of Blessings.
Calvin W. Allison
#12. 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
#13. I have seldom heard people engaging in deep intellectual conversations. Most chats are either about mundane life decisions [ ... ] or juicy gossip.
Gad Saad
#14. Even before I had children I wanted the intensity of my life to get greater. I wanted to feel things more strongly. I wanted my intellectual parameters to expand. But it comes back to your own desire to be engaged and to live up to your parameters.
Jeff Koons
#15. Agitation is that part of our intellectual life where vitality results; there ideas are born, breed and bring forth.
George Edward Woodberry
#16. My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. All I am I owe to my mother. I attribute my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her.
George Washington
#17. I can't imagine a secular life, a spiritual life, an intellectual life, a physical life. I mean, we would be completely wrought with schizophrenia, wouldn't we?
Terry Tempest Williams
#18. Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm: it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as to a treasure, and not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words, or in exact and priggish argument.
George Sand
#19. The truth is: Everyone will judge you. But this depends upon your intellectual capacity whether you are able to distinguish constructive criticism between an insult coming from other people's opinions about you.
Anonymous
#20. His persona seemed very odd to me: it was as though he'd once seen an intellectual, and had spent the rest of his life impersonating him.
John Cleese
#21. As an artist, I do not need to be rich but I do need to be richly supported. I cannot allow my emotional and intellectual life to stagnate or the work will show it. My life will show it.
Julia Cameron
#23. My wife is a big fan of George Oppen and I got into him. I could have a career like his. It's not an alpha male situation, George Oppen. It's quiet. It's poetry.He just lived a life of an intellectual poet.
Stephen Malkmus
#24. The heart symbolizes the center of our moral, spiritual, and intellectual life. It is the seat of our conscience and life.
Billy Graham
#25. Believe me when I tell you that thrift of time will repay you in after life, with a usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams; and that waste of it will make you dwindle, alike in intellectual and moral stature, beyond your darkest reckoning.
Herbert Gladstone, 1st Viscount Gladstone
#26. Anti-intellectual resentment is common in all of American life and it has many diverse expressions. Refusing to draft college players might have been one of them.
Bill James
Michael Lewis
#27. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.
Henry David Thoreau
#28. To quarrel with the uncertainty that besets us in intellectual affairs would be about as reasonable as to object to live one's life with due thought for the morrow because no man can be sure he will alive an hour hence.
Thomas Huxley
#29. It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one's intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake.
George Orwell
#30. For us, not cooperating in the monopoly regimes of intellectual property rights and patents and biodiversity - saying "no" to patents on life, and developing intellectual ideas of resistance - is very much a continuation of Gandhian satyagraha. It is, for me, keeping life free in its diversity.
Vandana Shiva
#31. Respect isn't something you command through intimidation and intellectual bullying. It's something you build through a long life of treating people how you want to be treated
Lena Dunham
#32. For Christians who desire to write, the call to read broadly is an absolute necessity, for writing is, in many ways, the process of digesting and synthesizing not only the thoughts and experiences of a writer's own life, but the writer's intellectual wanderings as well.
Gene C. Fant Jr.
#33. All our life," William James told us in the prologue, "so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits - practical, emotional, and intellectual - systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be."9.29
Charles Duhigg
#34. Whoever prefers the material comforts of life over intellectual wealth is like the owner of a palace who moves into the servants' quarters and leaves the sumptuous rooms empty.
Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach
#35. I knew lots of Irish ladies in my life who would say daft things and then would just say something incredibly truthful in a very simple way with simple language - a few well chosen words that would take an intellectual five minutes to express. I like that.
Steve Coogan
#36. I would counsel people to go to college, because it's one of the best times in your life in terms of who you meet and develop a broad set of intellectual skills.
Bill Gates
#37. The more rigid and exclusive one makes the border between philosophy and theology, the more that distinction itself has to fall on the side of theology, and the more inaccessible that very distinction becomes to philosophy
Gregory B. Sadler
#38. Scientific reason, with its strict conscience, its lack of prejudice, and its determination to question every result again the moment it might lead to the least intellectual advantage, does in an area of secondary interest what we ought to be doing with the basic questions of life.
Robert Musil
#39. If intellect could be acquired from books, nobody would have been more intellectual than a book monger.
Kunal Narayan Uniyal
#40. Earlier in my life, I performed a lot of music. Some of it because I felt it was a demonstration, or a representation of certain intellectual concepts that were very exciting and important.
Michael Tilson Thomas
#41. Reason flows from the blending of rational thought and feeling. If the two functions are torn apart, thinking deteriorates into schizoid intellectual activity and feeling deteriorates into neurotic life-damaging passions.
Erich Fromm
#42. the regime's utter cultural and intellectual mediocrity, and especially its obsession with ensuring a rigid outward conformity to its neo-traditionalist values in public life.
Helen Graham
#43. To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife.
W. H. Auden
#44. The art of life lies in taking pleasures as they pass, and the keenest pleasures are not intellectual, nor are they always moral.
Aristippus
#46. We, the salt of the earth, should endeavor to follow, by never letting anything disturb us in the pursuit of our intellectual life, however much the storm of the world may invade and agitate our personal environment.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#47. 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
#48. Embrace relational uncertainty. It's called romance. Embrace spiritual uncertainty. It's called mystery. Embrace occupational uncertainty. It's called destiny. Embrace emotional uncertainty. It's called joy. Embrace intellectual uncertainty. It's called revelation.
Mark Batterson
#49. 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
#50. Only through the conscious action of the working masses in city and country can it be brought to life, only through the people's highest intellectual maturity and inexhaustible idealism can it be brought safely through all storms and find its way to port.
Rosa Luxemburg
#51. Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force.
Rudolf Rocker
#52. There a series of Catholic rituals and teachings had offered her young life a coherent universe. By 1946, Savannah had for O'Connor ceded to the university world of Iowa, where new influences, including intellectual joys, brought with them questions and skepticism.
Flannery O'Connor
#53. All through your life you are building an intellectual and emotional framework and it gets bigger and bigger and the more there are places where books and experiences can latch.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#54. Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child's small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.
William James
#56. For my own part, without breach of truth or modesty, I may affirm that my life has been, on the whole, the life of a philosopher: from my birth I was made an intellectual creature, and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been, even from my schoolboy days.
Thomas De Quincey
#57. All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.
Karl Marx
#58. Feel like Christ and you will be a Christ; feel like Buddha and you will be a Buddha. It is feeling that is the life, the strength, the vitality, without which no amount of intellectual activity can reach God. It is through the heart that the Lord is seen, and not through the intellect.
Swami Vivekananda
#59. I'm a Christian, but I'm not a puritan. I believe in pleasure and orgiastic pleasure has its place, intellectual pleasure has its place, social pleasure has its place, televisual pleasure has its place [in life].
Cornel West
#60. All forms of birth
physical, intellectual, spiritual or emotional
bring one to the depths. The power to give birth originates in the creative life spirit birthing all, the seen and the unseen.
Amy Wright
#61. Just as Manda Lewis's impressions of the world had been informed by her reading
leading her to expect balls, duels, and conveniently timed thunderstorms out of life
so, too, had mine; but what I expected was intellectual commerce between equals.
Marie Brennan
#62. Religion is not theory - it is life. It is not intellectual conviction - it is divine humanity, and nothing else.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#63. I didn't get a high school diploma. I really didn't have much of an education, which left me open to educating myself throughout my life, without the limitations on intellectual curiosity a formal education can impose. I followed what interested me.
Elayne Boosler
#64. Peggy had not forgotten the intellectual and social ambitions she had started life with only a decade before. Years so weary and routine laden, they seemed like a single year that had repeated itself. She wanted to be creative and self-reliant.
Nell Zink
#65. Mountains and deserts, with their sparse life at the limit of existence, make one restless and disconsolate; one becomes an explorer in an intellectual realm as well as in a physical one.
George Schaller
#66. The progress from infancy to boyhood is imperceptible. In that long dawn of the mind we take but little heed. The years pass by us, one by one, little distinguishable from each other. But when the intellectual sun of our life is risen, we take due note of joy and sorrow.
Bryan Procter
#67. I was enamored of New York City intellectual life and was really into Philip Roth because I was raised by self-loathing Midwesterners who were from southern Illinois, who felt like fish out of water when they came to the East Coast when I was a kid.
Meghan Daum
#68. Plato's concern is not just an intellectual issue, but it is knitted with emotional life as well.
Rebecca Goldstein
#69. The grandmother, the mother, the worker, the student, the intellectual, the professional, the unemployed, everybody identified with the songs because they were descriptions of life in the city.
Ruben Blades
#70. There's a tradition in British intellectual life of mocking any non-political force that gets involved in politics, especially within the sphere of the arts and the theatre.
Harold Pinter
#71. Our job is not to worship history and culture like fetishes, but to feed them into our living, creative stream of personal life for spiritual and intellectual reprocessing.
Angus MacLean
#72. Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them
Lev S. Vygotsky
#73. Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene! ... Her ineffable charm keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection
Thomas Hardy
#74. There is an intimate connection between our moral life and our intellectual life. Sometimes I think the history of our times can be described as an argument about whether or not this connection is true.
James V. Schall
#75. Life must be filled up, and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford.
Samuel Johnson
#76. At its heart, all intellectual and emotional life is a conversation, and the conversation begins at birth.
Susan Jacoby
#77. Intellectual discussion, after all, is the real joy of the winter of life, when other pleasures have flown, as it were.
John Barth
#78. The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciation of beauty, and of intellectual distinction, and of duty.
Alfred North Whitehead
#79. I am passionate about everything in my life
first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that's a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I'm a woman, but because it's such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society.
bell hooks
Bell Hooks
#80. Dartmouth is the place I've devoted my life to, so it's very sad to see this kind of decline in the intellectual strength of the institution.
Jon Appleton
#81. For many decades now - and certainly during my adult life in academe - the Western intellectual world has not been convinced that theology is a pursuit that can be engaged in with intellectual honesty and integrity.
Arthur Peacocke
#82. What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
Thomas Mann
#83. The Greeks, those originators of the intellectual life, fixed for us the idea of the poet. He was a divine man; more sacred than the priest, who was at best an intermediary between men and the gods, but in the poet the god was present and spoke.
George Edward Woodberry
#84. 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
#85. Awards movies are normally sort of ... life-affirming and noble. It's probably too much of an intellectual conceit and, you know, people don't like it when you don't lead the bad guy off in cuffs.
David Fincher
#86. Jewish students, by culture and by ability and by the very nature of their liveliness, make a university a much more habitable place in terms of intellectual life.
Gordon Gee
#87. Bike riding requires permanent sacrifice. It means training 11 months out of 12 and 110 days of racing, whatever the weather conditions. Early in life, I realised I did not have intellectual potential, so I dedicated myself to cycling.
Richard Virenque
#88. Marriage is a linchpin in many women's lives, but many other things can create a satisfying life. I adore my career. It stretches every physical, emotional, and intellectual muscle I have.
Geraldine Stutz
#90. Life is essentially a series of events to be lived through rather than intellectual riddles to be played with and solved.
George Arthur Buttrick
#91. The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#92. Wisdom is the most-sought intellectual degree whose subjects are regularly learned throughout life with an open mind in an open university called life and taught by a teacher who is none other than self-experience only.
Anuj
#93. The intellectual is engage-he is pledged, committed, enlisted. What everyone else is willing to admit, namely that ideas and abstractions are of signal importance in human life, he imperatively feels.
Richard Hofstadter
#94. And what, then, is belief? It is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#95. He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
Iris Murdoch
#96. A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics or in trade, gains largely in our esteem if we discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#97. Every Latter-day Saint should make the study of this book a lifetime pursuit. Otherwise, he is placing his soul in jeopardy and neglecting that which could give spiritual and intellectual unity to his whole life.
Ezra Taft Benson
#98. The truth is that most people lack the intellectual ability and courage to resist a popular movement, however pernicious and ill-considered.
Ludwig Von Mises
#99. Emotions are the key to many aspects of life. They are precisely the elements that make human beings human. I think the fact that emotions have been reduced and put off to the side in intellectual work, particularly in the 20th Century, is tragic.
Bill Viola
#100. Our guiding principle was that design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society.
Walter Gropius
