“Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love.”
Flowers for Algernon (1966)
Context: Don't misunderstand me," I said. "Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.
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Daniel Keyes 47
American author 1927–2014Related quotes
“[…]a person stops searching for information and knowledge of one’s self, ignorance sets in.”
Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!
“Search not to find what lies too deeply hid,
Nor to know things, whose knowledge is forbid.”
Of Prudence, line 231.
David Colander, Complexity and the History of Economic Thought, Routledge, London and New York, 2000, p. 6.
2000s
“are you saying that the feeling of searching for a missing sock is like searching for love?”
Source: A Place Called Here
“For his voice could search the heart, and that was his gift and his strength.”
The Devil and Daniel Webster (1937)
Context: Then he turned to Jabez Stone and showed him as he was — an ordinary man who'd had hard luck and wanted to change it. And, because he'd wanted to change it, now he was going to be punished for all eternity. And yet there was good in Jabez Stone, and he showed that good. He was hard and mean, in some ways, but he was a man. There was sadness in being a man, but it was a proud thing too. And he showed what the pride of it was till you couldn't help feeling it. Yes, even in hell, if a man was a man, you'd know it. And he wasn't pleading for any one person any more, though his voice rang like an organ. He was telling the story and the failures and the endless journey of mankind. They got tricked and trapped and bamboozled, but it was a great journey. And no demon that was ever foaled could know the inwardness of it — it took a man to do that.
The fire began to die on the hearth and the wind before morning to blow. The light was getting gray in the room when Dan'l Webster finished. And his words came back at the end to New Hampshire ground, and the one spot of land that each man loves and clings to. He painted a picture of that, and to each one of that jury he spoke of things long forgotten. For his voice could search the heart, and that was his gift and his strength. And to one, his voice was like the forest and its secrecy, and to another like the sea and the storms of the sea; and one heard the cry of his lost nation in it, and another saw a little harmless scene he hadn't remembered for years. But each saw something. And when Dan'l Webster finished he didn't know whether or not he'd saved Jabez Stone. But he knew he'd done a miracle. For the glitter was gone from the eyes of the judge and jury, and, for the moment, they were men again, and knew they were men.
“4084. Search not a Wound too deep, lest thou make a new one.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
Source: Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search (1975), p. 122.