
“Love seems inevitable, necessary, as normal and as easy a process as respiration.”
Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)
Source: Ficciones
“Love seems inevitable, necessary, as normal and as easy a process as respiration.”
Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)
“I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.”
Source: All the Pretty Horses
“How can one look happy when he is thinking about the anomalous Zeeman effect?”
Writings on Physics and Philosophy (1994), p. 15
Context: A colleague who met me strolling rather aimlessly in the beautiful streets of Copenhagen said to me in a friendly manner, “You look very unhappy”; whereupon I answered fiercely, “How can one look happy when he is thinking about the anomalous Zeeman effect?”.
“Faith isn't an act of intelligence, it's an act of imagination.”
Source: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal
Alfred Binet (1909, 118) as cited in: Seymour Bernard Sarason, John Doris (1979), Educational handicap, public policy, and social history. p. 32
Modern ideas about children, 1909/1975
Vol. I, p. 113 <!-- 90? intellectual cleverness that remains merely cynical and confined to the personal or partisan contrasted with wise compassionate awareness which transcends such bounds and abides with the eternal and universal qualities and vital resolutions beyond all mortal aims. -->
1980s, Letters to the Schools (1981, 1985)
Context: The very nature of intelligence is sensitivity, and this sensitivity is love. Without this intelligence there can be no compassion. Compassion is not the doing of charitable acts or social reform; it is free from sentiment, romanticism and emotional enthusiasm. It is as strong as death. It is like a great rock, immovable in the midst of confusion, misery and anxiety. Without this compassion no new culture or society can come into being. Compassion and intelligence walk together; they are not separate. Compassion acts through intelligence. It can never act through the intellect. Compassion is the essence of the wholeness of life.
Source: Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963), pp. 27-28.