Top 100 The Intellectual Life Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#7. 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
#8. Literature is a comprehensive essence of the intellectual life of a nation.
William Shakespeare
#9. 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
#10. 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.
#11. The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
Pat Conroy
#12. 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
#13. The life of a visual communicator should be one of systematic and exciting intellectual chaos.
Alberto Cairo
#14. I have spent a good part of my life showing what an intellectual bubble the Left lives in.
Dennis Prager
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#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
#22. The heart symbolizes the center of our moral, spiritual, and intellectual life. It is the seat of our conscience and life.
Billy Graham
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. The art of life lies in taking pleasures as they pass, and the keenest pleasures are not intellectual, nor are they always moral.
Aristippus
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. I've noticed over the past years of my writerly life that women writers in particular are discouraged in cleverly disguised forms from including the intellectual in their creative material way more than you would believe.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#57. One of the century's most famous intellectual pronouncements comes at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus: There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
William Styron
#58. It wasn't easy to learn about Gustave LeBon. For being the father of such an enduring theory, almost nothing has been written about him. Only one man has ever tried to piece his life story together - Bob Nye, a professor of European intellectual history at Oregon State University.
Jon Ronson
#59. 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. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
Henry David Thoreau
#60. The one man other than my father who made the most lasting impression was an uncle, Serge B. Benson. He taught me in three different classes - but above all, he taught me lessons in moral, physical, and intellectual courage that I have tried to apply in later life.
Ezra Taft Benson
#61. 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
#62. The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.
A.S. Byatt
#63. In the Church, bodily asceticism has always been the supreme road to
theological knowledge. It is not possible for man to come to know the truth of life, the truth of Godand the truth of his own existence purely through intellectual categories ...
Christos Yannaras
#64. There will always be those little minds who, out of vanity or intellectual display, will attempt to destroy faith in the very foundations of life.
Ezra Taft Benson
#65. It was your little white soul I tried to keep near me- even when life was at its loudest and every intellectual idea of God seemed the sheerest mockery. - F. Scott Fitzgerald, Benediction
F Scott Fitzgerald
#66. Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commrnce from that point on.
Georges Bataille
#67. An intellectual is a person who acquired the knowledge and knows where and how to use it.
Debasish Mridha
#68. 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
#69. For me, it was like this: pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere as a man possessed may be fixated on the sexual: under its spell, sucked into it.
Walter Benjamin
#70. Strenuous intellectual work and the study of God's Nature are the angels that will lead me through all the troubles of this life with consolation, strength, and uncompromising rigor.
Albert Einstein
#71. 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
#72. The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#73. What we want in students is creativity and a willingness to fail. I always say to students, 'If you've never at some point stayed up all night talking to your new boyfriend about the meaning of life instead of preparing for the test, then you're not really an intellectual.'
Alison Gopnik
#74. Without the interplay of human against human, the chief interest in life is gone; most of the intellectual values are gone; most of the reason for living is gone.
Isaac Asimov
#75. Intellectual activity is perhaps the greatest pleasure of life; chess is one of the forms of intellectual activity.
Siegbert Tarrasch
#76. 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
#77. One of the wonderful things about Internet is it's like a salon. It brings people together from different intellectual walks of life.
Eric Kandel
#78. 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
#79. You see, there is an intellectual side to life but also a side to life where deep needs are experienced. We falsely think that one side deals with truth and the other with fantasy. Both need the truth, and the elimination of one by the other is not the world in which God intends for us to live.
Ravi Zacharias
#80. Before going back to college, i knew i didn't want to be an intellectual, spending my life in books and libraries without knowing what the hell is going on in the streets. Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together.
Assata Shakur
#81. In intellectual honesty, we should be willing to study and explore the spiritual life with all the rigor and determination we would give to any field of research.
Richard J. Foster
#82. The joys of theory are the sweetest intellectual pleasures of life
Ludwig Feuerbach
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.
Bill Gates
#86. People never will recollect that mere learning and mere cleverness are of next to no value in life, while energy and intellectual grip, the things that are inborn and cannot be taught, are everything.
Thomas Huxley
#87. All our life, 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. - William James
Charles Duhigg
#88. It is only men who are free, who create the inventions and intellectual works which to us moderns make life worth while.
Albert Einstein
#89. Yale is a crucible in American life for the accommodation of intellectual achievement, of wisdom, of refinement, with the democratic ideals of openness, of social justice and of equal opportunity.
Benno C. Schmidt Jr.
#90. Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste.
Terence McKenna
#91. Intellectual life requires for its expansion and manifestation the influences and assimilation of the interests and affections of others.
Jane Addams
#92. We not only grew up on Be-Bop; Be-Bop raised us. For my generation, Be-Bop came on like a light bulb going flash behind the eyes.For us, it was not only an intellectual movement, but a way of life. We walked, dressed, and rapped Be-Bop.
Ishmael Reed
#93. 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
#94. In treading upon the ashes of dead men in Italy, Egypt - on the banks of the Bosphorus, one almost despairs to think how idle are the dreams and toils of this life, and were it not for the intellectual pleasure of knowing and learning, one would almost be damaged by travel in these historic lands.
William T. Sherman
#95. 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
#96. The show is not a history lesson or intellectual exploration. It is entertainment based on tension, irony and storytelling that is closely related to today's life.
Matthew Weiner
#97. The manner in which one single ray of light, one single precious hint, will clarify and energize the whole mental life of him who receives it, is among the most wonderful and heavenly of intellectual phenomena.
Arnold Bennett
#98. Is there intellectual life in America? At present, the answer is no.
Camille Paglia
#99. Society seems to find it irresistible to characterise the "unworldliness" of the male intellectual and academic in terms of his failure to control the women in his life.
Germaine Greer
#100. What is wisdom? It is the result of multiple paradigms brought to their intellectual furthest reaches and balanced and merged together. The fundamentalist, the person who only sees life through a single lens, can never hope for wisdom.
James Rozoff
