Top 100 Intellectual Life Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Agitation is that part of our intellectual life where vitality results; there ideas are born, breed and bring forth.
George Edward Woodberry
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. The heart symbolizes the center of our moral, spiritual, and intellectual life. It is the seat of our conscience and life.
Billy Graham
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.
Karl Marx
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
Thomas Mann
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Engineering is not only study of 45 subjects but it is moral studies of intellectual life.
Prakhar Srivastav
#21. The more critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes. When reason is overvalued, the individual suffers a loss. Relying more on facts and rationality than on imagination and theory detracts from the quality of a person's intellectual life.
C. G. Jung
#22. No vital Christianity is possible unless at least three aspects of it are developed. These are the inner life of devotion, the outer life of service, and the intellectual life of rationality.
D. Elton Trueblood
#23. History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff well, it might as well be dead.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#24. Greed probably figures in my intellectual life as well, as I attempt to absorb a massive amount of information with consequent mental indigestion.
Etty Hillesum
#25. Consistency in opinion is the slow poison of intellectual life, the destroyer of its vividness and energy.
Humphry Davy
#26. How am I to put this together with my human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my transcendence, my brains, and my fearful, fearful ambition?
Joanna Russ
#27. The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
William James
#29. 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
#30. People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#31. People who were not active in the intellectual life of the country could go on without feeling restricted, except they could not go where they wanted. They could not cross the border to the West whenever they liked.
Stefan Heym
#32. Literature is a comprehensive essence of the intellectual life of a nation.
William Shakespeare
#33. The Internet is to our intellectual life what the universal unconscious is to our psychological life. In fact, the Internet is the new universal unconscious. It's not even a metaphor anymore.
Phillip DePoy
#34. The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.
Siri Hustvedt
#35. 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
#36. Evangelicals do not, characteristically, look to the intellectual life as an arena in which to glorify God because, at least in America, our history has been pragmatic, populist, charismatic, and technological more than intellectual.
Mark A. Noll
#37. Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste.
Terence McKenna
#38. As for the excellent little wretches who grow up in what they are taught, with never a scruple or a query, ... they signify nothing in the intellectual life of the race.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#39. Intellectual life requires for its expansion and manifestation the influences and assimilation of the interests and affections of others.
Jane Addams
#40. The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
Pat Conroy
#41. There is, therefore, a more perfect intellectual life in the angels. In them the intellect does not proceed to self-knowledge from anything exterior, but knows itself through itself ...
Thomas Aquinas
#42. Is there intellectual life in America? At present, the answer is no.
Camille Paglia
#43. As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford - British historians are supposed to write about kings - so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The students work harder there.
Niall Ferguson
#44. The intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful, if man will live the life of nature, and not import into his mind difficulties which are none of his.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#45. Research must continue to be the centerpiece of intellectual life, and our commitment to research must grow, because our problems are growing.
Ernest L. Boyer
#46. The pointless ferocities of intellectual life shock businessmen, who kill only to eat.
Mason Cooley
#47. The goal of intellectual life should be to see and understand what is true, not merely to adhere to a prevailing orthodoxy.
Jeffrey Tucker
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. The life of a visual communicator should be one of systematic and exciting intellectual chaos.
Alberto Cairo
#51. 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
#52. I have spent a good part of my life showing what an intellectual bubble the Left lives in.
Dennis Prager
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. I have seldom heard people engaging in deep intellectual conversations. Most chats are either about mundane life decisions [ ... ] or juicy gossip.
Gad Saad
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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.
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. If intellect could be acquired from books, nobody would have been more intellectual than a book monger.
Kunal Narayan Uniyal
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. The art of life lies in taking pleasures as they pass, and the keenest pleasures are not intellectual, nor are they always moral.
Aristippus
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Religion is not theory - it is life. It is not intellectual conviction - it is divine humanity, and nothing else.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#100. 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
