Top 100 Intellectual Thinking Quotes
#1. Plain intellectual thinking is the peak of ignorance because all that you will know is to play with a few aspects and make others look like fools.
Jaggi Vasudev
#2. I think the term "intellectual property" should be avoided, not because it's a bad term, but because it mixes things up that shouldn't be mixed up. There are different forms, and they hardly have anything to do with each other.
Linus Torvalds
#3. The lesson of Left Behind is a warning to repent the sin of critical thinking, which the fundamentalist, eager for people to embrace the Gospel of irrational nonsense, equates with intellectual pride.
Robert M. Price
#4. I think we should think of AI as the intellectual equivalent of a backhoe. It will be much better than us at a lot of things.
Geoffrey Hinton
#5. It's not just the emotional, intellectual, and physical gaps between you and money. The real gap is always between what you think you want and what you actually want, deep down.
Stuart Wilde
#6. With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.
Ray Bradbury
#7. I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.
Steven Pinker
#8. What is an intellectual? In general, someone seriously devoted to what used to be called the "life of the mind": thinking pursued not instrumentally, for the sake of practical goals, but simply for the sake of knowing and understanding.
Gary Gutting
#9. Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.
John Forbes Nash
#10. If you think you'll find intellectual stimulation, you're thinking of another era. The conversations are invariably about money or property or schools. I've never been more bored by casual chat.
Andrew Sullivan
#11. I think it indisputable that the distance between the intellectual faculties of different men is greater than that between the same faculties in some men and some other animals.
Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
#12. I think kids, in general as an audience, are the way forward because they're not sort of sullied by intellectual expectation or this or that. It's a very pure kind of response to the work.
Johnny Depp
#13. However, I think anything is better than high intellectual pressure. That is the most unbecoming thing there is. It makes the noses of the young girls so particularly large.
Oscar Wilde
#14. MindSparks has produced some of the best materials on the market for teaching students how to read and write history with intellectual integrity and depth. Rarely have I come across curriculum so useful in helping students become literate, thinking citizens. Bravo.
Sam Wineburg
#15. I have been meditating for many years now, but I think for quite a few years my relationship with meditation was very intellectual. I would do meditation for all the usual things that you would think about, to be more calm, be more productive, relieve stress.
Karan Bajaj
#16. What is addressed to us for contemplation does not threaten us, but makes us intellectual beings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#17. I was not thinking about infinite multipliers when I was 10. But I did have a father who was a Ph.D. in commerce and finance and an intellectual man. And so I had a feeling, probably about the time I went to college, that I would try to be a scholar and teacher, but I didn't know which field.
Michael Spence
#18. All observations point to the fact that the intellectual woman is masculinized; in her, warm, intuitive knowledge has yielded to cold unproductive thinking.
Helene Deutsch
#19. 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
#20. I think ideas only lead to change for intellectual people; and not even them. What really leads to change is experience. Life itself is the teacher.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#21. I think that what's so interesting about her is that she took to an extreme her embrace of peasant life even though she was a singing and dancing European intellectual.
Tom Jaine
#22. When you get a critique, people think you're criticizing them but it's really an intellectual conversation. You can't get emotionally attached.
Kalup Linzy
#23. The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models.
Rem Koolhaas
#24. Original thinking migrates each day in search of nourishment.
Maya Angelou
#25. I think there are a lot of similarities between writing and music. Music is much more direct and much more emotional and that's the level I want to be at when I'm writing. Writing is much more intellectual and indirect and abstract, in a way.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#26. So, we think about God far to easily and that's because of a lot of social, intellectual, and scientific changes that have taken place in the western world and that has made God very problematic for a lot of people.
Karen Armstrong
#27. Error ... is less an intellectual problem than an existential one - a crisis not in what we know, but in who we are. We hear something of that identity crisis in the questions we ask ourselves in the aftemath of error: What was I thinking? How could I have done that?
Kathryn Schulz
#28. Emerson was not passionate about abolition. He wasn't a passionate person. He was a cool intellectual, and I think he probably was a little uncomfortable with passionate people, but he was against slavery.
Nell Irvin Painter
#29. Do not try to approach God with your thinking mind. It may only stimulate your intellectual ideas, activities, and beliefs. Try to approach God with your crying heart. It will awaken your soulful, spiritual consciousness.
Sri Chinmoy
#30. I could never think well of a man's intellectual or moral character, if he was habitually unfaithful to his appointments.
Nathanael Emmons
#31. I'm too intellectual. I don't think that the theological vocabulary is as important as the experience.
Rodger Kamenetz
#32. As intellectual as we think we are, you still trip, we still have human foibles, sexuality, all the different things to still make you aware of your humanity.
Robin Williams
#33. We have no proof that Socrates ever existed. We only know from witnesses to his life that he did. Like Jesus, he never wrote anything down. It doesn't matter to me whether he did or not exist because we have his teachings, his method of thinking, and his extreme intellectual and moral courage.
Christopher Hitchens
#34. It's perfectly clear that the millions of babies, who are crying at this very moment, want unanimously to be next to a live body. Do you really think they're all wrong? Theirs is the voice of nature. This is the clear, pure voice of nature, without intellectual interference.
Jean Liedloff
#35. We always think from where we come from. We always think from the sources that shape our understanding. I think about the world through the lens of my Islamic tradition. I accept this but I must also have intellectual humility.
Tariq Ramadan
#36. My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.
Billy Connolly
#37. I think there is a potential civic culture in Arab countries that can lead to democratic institutions and I think Iraq is probably the best place to put that proposition to the test Well, you're going to find a disproportionate number of Jews in any sort of intellectual undertaking.
Richard Perle
#38. I think comedy has to be an intellectual pursuit. It comes down to logic and analysis. As soon as it becomes emotional, it's not comedy anymore.
Ricky Gervais
#39. When I watch a film, I watch it as an audience instead of thinking as an actor or an intellectual. I see whether it made me laugh, get involved or shocked me at certain points. Something has to stir inside me.
Sonakshi Sinha
#40. It's always best not to be thinking a hell of a lot while you're acting, because you want it to be as spontaneous as possible, not too intellectual. Just behaving and listening to other people who you're doing scenes with. I always like the latter when it looks easy, even though it may not be.
Gary Cole
#41. I feel like we want to compartmentalise things and say, 'Well, that's emotional, artistic and subjective, while this is intellectual, objective and measured.' I have difficulty thinking that's the way we experience things.
Shane Carruth
#42. I don't want people running around saying Gwen Brooks's work is intellectual. That makes people think instantly about obscurity. It shouldn't have to mean that, but it often seems to.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#43. The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's going on in front of me.
David Foster Wallace
#44. Those 'back burner' thoughts, the ones the brain isn't quite sure about yet, may cook the slowest yet they often manage to be the tastiest when they come out.
Criss Jami
#45. I realized that there was an intellectual content in music, a kind of thinking, that I would never be able to hear.
Garth Greenwell
#46. And this all fits very well with the modern way of thinking about stuff in which all you need to do, in order to attain a sense of personal accomplishment and earn the accolades of your peers, is to demonstrate an ability to slot new examples of things into the proper intellectual pigeon-holes.
Neal Stephenson
#47. Since we think about ourselves so much of the time, it is comforting to assume ... that we really know the score ... [But] this is not an easy assignment. [As] Santayana wrote, 'Nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see one's equation written out.'
Gordon Allport
#48. I think the freedom to express one's views is more important than intellectual property.
Shepard Fairey
#49. Give up identification with this mass of flesh as well as with what thinks it a mass. Both are intellectual imaginations. Recognise your true self as undifferentiated awareness, unaffected by time, past, present or future, and enter Peace.
Adi Shankara
#50. People think I hate Billy Martin. I don't. I hate some of the things he did. And I will say I don't understand him. Billy Martin is not an intellectual, but there is a cunningness to him that is something to behold.
Reggie Jackson
#51. [ ... ] rationalism is a form of intellectual bigotry which, in thinking about reality, tries to take it into account as little as possible.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#52. I think, in the initial process of discovering a character and the analytical process - and this is what I did take from Buddhism - initially I think there has to be an analytical, intellectual approach. And that has to be abandoned by the time you're playing the game.
Jake Gyllenhaal
#53. I think if you look back through the intellectual history of human beings you can trace the way that intellectual technologies influence the way we think.
Nicholas G. Carr
#54. In love we do not think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.
William Hazlitt
#55. It is better for the intellectual not to talk all the time. To begin with, it would exhaust him, and, above all, it would keep him from thinking. He must create if he can, first and foremost, especially if his creation does not side-step the problems of his time.
Albert Camus
#56. The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.
Thomas Huxley
#57. I spend a lot more time than any person should have to talking with lawyers and thinking about intellectual property issues.
Linus Torvalds
#58. Those who desire to rise as high as our human condition allows, must renounce intellectual pride, the omnipotence of clear thinking, belief in the absolute power of logic.
Alexis Carrel
#59. Intellectual liberty [is] the right to think right and the right to think wrong. Thought is the means by which we endeavor to arrive at truth.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#60. 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
#61. The philosophical implication of race-thinking is that by offering us the mystery of heredity as an explanation, it diverts our attention from the social and intellectual factors that make up personality.
Jacques Barzun
#62. 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
#63. At a certain age some people's minds close up; they live on their intellectual fat.
William Lyon Phelps
#64. I was always a feminist, for I liked intellectual revolt as much as I disliked physical violence. On the whole, I think women havelost something precious, but have gained, immeasurably, by the passing of the old order.
Ellen Glasgow
#65. While scholars are comparing and contrasting theories, debating intellectual questions, and dividing humankind into categories, the world is changed by persons with faith, spirit, emotion, compassion, intuition, and irrational thinking.
Grey Owl
#66. 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
#67. The point, as I emphasize in the book, is not for players to become professionals, but rather to have innovative and creative ways of thinking about real problems as part of their intellectual toolkit.
David Williamson Shaffer
#68. The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been mainstays even of oppressed cultures. Shamans, magicians and theologians are highly skilled in their intricate and arcane arts. No, the impediment is political and hierarchical.
Carl Sagan
#69. I am a political animal, because for God's sakes I think "We The People" is a job. I think experienced self government demands on all levels - intellectual, moral, historical, and spiritual level. We are supposed to be engaged and give directions to our elected employees.
Ted Nugent
#70. Don't fall in trap of mediocrity and loose thinking. Surround yourself with intellectual people and thinkers. Be an awesome version of yourself day after day!!
Reshma Wable
#71. We are used to thinking of doctoring as a solitary, intellectual task. But making medicine go right is less often like making a difficult diagnosis than like making sure everyone washes their hands.
Atul Gawande
#72. If you are not thinking universally and intellectually, you can only remain flawlessly stagnant.
Lionel Suggs
#73. 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
#74. I'm not sure that pasteurized thinking is rich enough in intellectual vitamins
Keith Laumer
#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. How could we have developed our intellectual skills without education?
Lailah Gifty Akita
#77. We are faced with the task of convincing a myth infatuated world that love and curiosity are sufficient and you don't have to delude yourself and frighten yourself with Iron Age fairy tales. This is a monumental task. I don't think there is an intellectual struggle more worthy of our efforts.
Sam Harris
#78. It is wonderful to work in an environment with a lot of smart people. It challenges you to think and work on a different level. If you play with better players, you learn a lot: perspectives, intellectual arguments, new ways of thinking about things.
Marissa Mayer
#79. I think it's an intellectual duty for a person who lives in a free society to read material not only with which you agree, but with which you disagree. Because every so often somebody you think is wrong will actually turn out to be right.
Tom Clancy
#80. I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis.
Walter Isaacson
#81. The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.
C. Vann Woodward
#82. Most men use their knowledge only under guidance from others because they lack the courage to think independently using their own reasoning abilities. It takes intellectual daring to discover the truth.
Immanuel Kant
#83. It is always the task of the intellectual to "think otherwise." This is not just a perverse idiosyncrasy. It is an absolutely essential feature of a society.
Harvey Cox
#84. By circumstance and perhaps also by inclination, I think in complete intellectual isolation. To expect others to help me think seems to me almost like expecting them to help me digest my food.
Eric Hoffer
#85. Now we've a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself.
Robert M. Pirsig
#86. What could be more advantageous in an intellectual contest - whether it be chess, bridge, or stock selection - than to have opponents who have been taught that thinking is a waste of energy?
Warren Buffett
#87. Today, the world rewards those with creative and intellectual muscles. So, women and skinny men need to shut up and start thinking.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#88. By physical liberty I mean the right to do anything which does not interfere with the happiness of another. By intellectual liberty I mean the right to think and the right to think wrong.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#89. I'm very proud that some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist.
Michel Foucault
#90. In the 1950s and early 1960s, psychoanalysis swept through the intellectual community, and it was the dominant mode of thinking about the mind. People felt that this was a completely new set of insights into human motivation, and that its therapeutic potential was significant.
Eric Kandel
#91. Intelligence is a separate gift, for the benefit of students, so that they may think of themselves as intellectual and not very intelligent, or intelligent and not very intellectual. One hopes, of course, that they try to bring the two virtues, the two elements, into their lives at the same time.
Maya Angelou
#92. Over the years he began displaying that rarest of intellectual gifts - the ability and willingness to change his mind and do it in an orderly, well-reasoned way.
Pat Conroy
#93. Intellectual labor is a common technique for the avoidance of thinking.
Peter Straub
#94. I think the universities have co-opted the intellectual, by and large. But there is an emerging intellectual set coming out of Washington think tanks now. There are people who are leaving the universities and working for the government or in think tanks, simply looking for freedom.
Richard Rodriguez
#95. What I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.
Salman Rushdie
#96. 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
#97. I think teenagers bring a lot of intellectual sophistication. They're wrestling with big questions. It's just that, a lot of times they do that separately from adults.
John Green
#98. Man reacts upon and toward the external universe in three ways, namely, by his active nature ; by his intellectual nature ; by his moral nature - that is, he acts upon it, thinks about it, and feels toward it.
Richard Maurice Bucke
#99. 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
