Quotes about intellect

page 7

Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
Context: Discontinuity of its linguistic and logical terms is for the conscious analytical intellect psychologically and logically prior to notions of continuity.... This functional priority... may not have been reflected in the history of the development of reason in all human communities.... But it is relevant for the West that the Pythagoreans, with their discrete integers and point patterns, came before Euclid, with his continuous metrical geometry, and that physical atomism as a speculative philosophy preceded by some two thousand years the conception of a continuous physical medium with properties of its own.<!--pp.13-14

Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1816)
Context: A philosophy without heart and a faith without intellect are abstractions from the true life of knowledge and faith. The man whom philosophy leaves cold, and the man whom real faith does not illuminate, may be assured that the fault lies in them, not in knowledge and faith. The former is still an alien to philosophy, the latter an alien to faith.

The Honolulu Advertiser (20 June 1959) https://www.newspapers.com/image/259239643/?terms=Pogo, cited in "Pogo on intelligent life in the universe" by Garson O'Toole, in Archive of the American Dialect Society listserver (16 February 2017) http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2017-February/146520.html, and in 'Pogo Comic on Extraterrestrials: Either Way, It’s a Mighty Soberin’ Thought", The Quote Investigator (18 February 2017) http://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/02/18/space/. This has often been paraphrased as: "Thar’s only two possibilities: Thar is life out there in the universe which is smarter than we are, or we’re the most intelligent life in the universe. Either way, it’s a mighty sobering thought."
Pogo comic strip (1948 - 1975), Porky Pine

Book II, Ch. 5, p. 345, as quoted in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment‎ (1992) edited by Michael Cyril William Hunter and David Wootton, p. 99
De la sagesse (1601)
Context: All Religions have this in common, that they are an outrage to common sense for they are pieced together out of a variety of elements, some of which seem so unworthy, sordid and at odds with man’s reason, that any strong and vigorous intelligence laughs at them; but others are so noble, illustrious, miraculous, and mysterious that the intellect can make no sense of them and finds them unpalatable. The human intellect is only capable of tackling mediocre subjects: it disdains petty subjects, and is startled by large ones. There is no reason to be surprised if it finds any religion hard to accept at first, for all are deficient in the mediocre and the commonplace, nor that it should require skill to induce belief. For the strong intellect laughs at religion, while the weak and superstitious mind marvels at it but is easily scandalized by it.

Source: Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966), p. 112
Context: It is the fallacy of all intellectuals to believe that intellect can grasp life. It cannot, because it works in terms of symbols and language. There is another factor involved: consciousness. If the flame of consciousness is low, a symbol has no power to evoke reality, and intellect is helpless.

Founding Address (1876)
Context: The freedom of thought is a sacred right of every individual man, and diversity will continue to increase with the progress, refinement, and differentiation of the human intellect. But if difference be inevitable, nay, welcome in thought, there is a sphere in which unanimity and fellowship are above all things needful. Believe or disbelieve as ye list — we shall at all times respect every honest conviction. But be one with us where there is nothing to divide — in action. Diversity in the creed, unanimity in the deed! This is that practical religion from which none dissents. This is that platform broad enough and solid enough to receive the worshipper and the "infidel." This is that common ground where we may all grasp hands as brothers, united in mankind's common cause.

Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, No. 1, pt. 14. Compare: "The march of the human mind is slow", Edmund Burke, Speech on the Conciliation of America, Vol. ii., p. 149.

Tremendous Trifles (1909)
Context: For my friend said that he opened his intellect as the sun opens the fans of a palm tree, opening for opening's sake, opening infinitely for ever. But I said that I opened my intellect as I opened my mouth, in order to shut it again on something solid. I was doing it at the moment. And as I truly pointed out, it would look uncommonly silly if I went on opening my mouth infinitely, for ever and ever.

कला र जीवन (Art and Life)
Art and Life
Context: Even Truth is of many types, like – Imaginative Truth, Practical Truth and Philosophical Truth. That which is in three times, that is called Truth and God itself is the first and the last truth.  But in practical life, truth takes many forms and as the practical truth I understand the sensible world's hard comprehensible truth. The one attained by the research of intellect, I call philosophical truth and imaginative that which illustrates through the subtle pictures of the mind. To say the stone is hard is practical truth, saying that adding up one and one the result will be two and through the existence of creation there is truth I call philosophical truth; and saying things like seeing Sarasvati talked with her, I understand as being the imaginative truth. For me, practicality is limited; philosophy, intellect is blind; I enjoy imaginative truth the most and through it find the glimpses of God

Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
Context: A view of the constitution of matter which recommended itself to Faraday as preferable to the one ordinarily held appears to me to be exactly the view I endeavor to picture as the constitution of spiritual beings. Centers of intellect, will, energy, and power, each mutually penetrable, while at the same time permeating what we call space, but each center retaining its own individuality, persistence of self, and memory. Whether these intelligent centers of the various spiritual forces which in their aggregate go to make up man's character or karma are also associated in any way with the forms of energy which, centered, form the material atom — whether these spiritual entities are material, not in the crude, gross sense of Lucretius, but material as sublimated through the piercing intellect of Faraday — is one of those mysteries which to us mortals will perhaps ever remain an unsolved problem. My next speculation is more difficult, and is addressed to those who not only take too terrestrial a view, but who deny the plausibility — nay, the possibility — of the existence of an unseen world at all. I reply we are demonstrably standing on the brink, at any rate, of one unseen world. I do not here speak of a spiritual or immaterial world. I speak of the world of the infinitely little, which must be still called a material world, although matter as therein existing or perceptible is something which our limited faculties do not enable us to conceive. It is the world — I do not say of molecular forces as opposed to molar, but of forces whose action lies mainly outside the limit of human perception, as opposed to forces evident to the gross perception of human organisms. I hardly know how to make clear to myself or to you the difference in the apparent laws of the universe which would follow upon a mere difference of bulk in the observer. Such an observer I must needs imagine as best I can.

Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
Context: A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences.

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Downing Street (April 1, 1850)
Context: a man of Intellect, of real and not sham Intellect, is by the nature of him likewise inevitably a man of nobleness, a man of courage, rectitude, pious strength; who, even because he is and has been loyal to the Laws of this Universe, is initiated into discernment of the same; to this hour a Missioned of Heaven; whom if men follow, it will be well with them; whom if men do not follow, it will not be well. Human Intellect, if you consider it well, is the exact summary of Human Worth; and the essence of all worth-ships and worships is reverence for that same.

A Poets View (1984)
Context: Acknowledgement, and celebration, of mystery probably constitutes the most consistent theme of my poetry from its very beginnings. Because it is a matter of which I am conscious, it is possible, however imprecisely, to call it an intellectual position; but it is one which emphasizes the incapacity of reason alone (much though I delight in elegant logic) to comprehend experience, and considers Imagination the chief of human faculties. It must therefore be by the exercise of that faculty that one moves toward faith, and possibly by its failure that one rejects it as delusion. Poems present their testimony as circumstantial evidences, not as closing argument. Where Wallace Stevens says, "God and the imagination are one," I would say that the imagination, which synergizes intellect, emotion and instinct, is the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable, to experience God.

As quoted by Morris Kline, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972)

Cassandra (1860)
Context: There is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilisation at which we have arrived. The stimulus, the training, the time, are all three wanting to us; or, in other words, the means and inducements are not there.
Look at the poor lives we lead. It is a wonder that we are so good as we are, not that we are so bad. In looking round we are struck with the power of the organisations we see, not with their want of power. Now and then, it is true, we are conscious that there is an inferior organisation, but, in general, just the contrary.

"Lectures On The Elevation Of The Labouring Portion Of The Community: Lecture II", in The Works of William Ellery Channing, D.D. (1844) Vol. III, p. 81
Context: Undoubtedly some men are more gifted than others, and are marked out for more studious lives. But the work of such men is not to do others' thinking for them, but to help them to think more vigorously and effectually. Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aid them to judge for themselves. The light and life which spring up in one soul are to be spread far and wide. Of all treasons against humanity, there is no one worse than his, who employs great intellectual force to keep down the intellect of his less-favoured brother.

Source: Isaiah's Job (1936), II
Context: The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Downing Street (April 1, 1850)
Context: In the lowest broad strata of the population, equally as in the highest and narrowest, are produced men of every kind of genius; man for man, your chance of genius is as good among the millions as among the units;—and class for class, what must it be! From all classes, not from certain hundreds now but from several millions, whatsoever man the gods had gifted with intellect and nobleness, and power to help his country, could be chosen: O Heavens, could,—if not by Tenpound Constituencies and the force of beer, then by a Reforming Premier with eyes in his head, who I think might do it quite infinitely better. Infinitely better. For ignobleness cannot, by the nature of it, choose the noble: no, there needs a seeing man who is himself noble, cognizant by internal experience of the symptoms of nobleness.

Letter to Dorothy Day (20 December 1961).
Context: Persons are not known by intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is, and who we are. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action. To shut out the person and to refuse to consider him as a person, as an other self, we resort to the impersonal "law" and to abstract "nature." That is to say we block off the reality of the other, we cut the intercommunication of our nature and his nature, and we consider only our own nature with its rights, its claims, it demands. And we justify the evil we do to our brother because he is no longer a brother, he is merely an adversary, an accused. To restore communication, to see our oneness of nature with him, and to respect his personal rights and his integrity, his worthiness of love, we have to see ourselves as similarly accused along with him … and needing, with him, the ineffable gift of grace and mercy to be saved. Then, instead of pushing him down, trying to climb out by using his head as a stepping-stone for ourselves, we help ourselves to rise by helping him to rise. For when we extend our hand to the enemy who is sinking in the abyss, God reaches out to both of us, for it is He first of all who extends our hand to the enemy. It is He who "saves himself" in the enemy, who makes use of us to recover the lost groat which is His image in our enemy.

Source: Darkness Visible (1990), II
Context: When I was a young writer there had been a stage where Camus, almost more than any other contemporary literary figure, radically set the tone for my own view of life and history. I read his novel The Stranger somewhat later than I should have — I was in my early thirties — but after finishing it I received the stab of recognition that proceeds from reading the work of a writer who has wedded moral passion to a style of great beauty and whose unblinking vision is capable of frightening the soul to its marrow. The cosmic loneliness of Meursault, the hero of that novel, so haunted me that when I set out to write The Confessions of Nat Turner I was impelled to use Camus’s device of having the story flow from the point of view of a narrator isolated in his jail cell during the hours before his execution. For me there was a spiritual connection between Meursault’s frigid solitude and the plight of Nat Turner — his rebel predecessor in history by a hundred years — likewise condemned and abandoned by man and God. Camus’s essay “Reflections on the Guillotine” is a virtually unique document, freighted with terrible and fiery logic; it is difficult to conceive of the most vengeful supporter of the death penalty retaining the same attitude after exposure to scathing truths expressed with such ardor and precision. I know my thinking was forever altered by that work, not only turning me around completely, convincing me of the essential barbarism of capital punishment, but establishing substantial claims on my conscience in regard to matters of responsibility at large. Camus was a great cleanser of my intellect, ridding me of countless sluggish ideas, and through some of the most unsettling pessimism I had ever encountered causing me to be aroused anew by life’s enigmatic promise.

Kosmos (1845 - 1847)
Context: From the remotest nebulæ and from the revolving double stars, we have descended to the minutest organisms of animal creation, whether manifested in the depths of ocean or on the surface of our globe, and to the delicate vegetable germs which clothe the naked declivity of the ice-crowned mountain summit; and here we have been able to arrange these phenomena according to partially known laws; but other laws of a more mysterious nature rule the higher spheres of the organic world, in which is comprised the human species in all its varied conformation, its creative intellectual power, and the languages to which it has given existence. A physical delineation of nature terminates at the point where the sphere of intellect begins, and a new world of mind is opened to our view. It marks the limit, but does not pass it.

IV. That the species of myth are five, with examples of each.
On the Gods and the Cosmos
Context: Of myths some are theological, some physical, some psychic, and again some material, and some mixed from these last two. The theological are those myths which use no bodily form but contemplate the very essence of the Gods: e. g., Kronos swallowing his children. Since god is intellectual, and all intellect returns into itself, this myth expresses in allegory the essence of god.
Myths may be regarded physically when they express the activities of the Gods in the world: e. g., people before now have regarded Kronos as time, and calling the divisions of time his sons say that the sons are swallowed by the father.
The psychic way is to regard the activities of the soul itself; the soul's acts of thought, though they pass on to other objects, nevertheless remain inside their begetters.
The material and last is that which the Egyptians have mostly used, owing to their ignorance, believing material objects actually to be Gods, and so calling them: e. g., they call the earth Isis, moisture Osiris, heat Typhon, or again, water Kronos, the fruits of the earth Adonis, and wine Dionysus.
To say that these objects are sacred to the Gods, like various herbs and stones and animals, is possible to sensible men, but to say that they are Gods is the notion of madmen — except, perhaps, in the sense in which both the orb of the sun and the ray which comes from the orb are colloquially called "the sun".

III. Concerning myths; that they are divine, and why.
On the Gods and the Cosmos

Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

Source: The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), p. 30

Source: The Esoteric Tradition (1935), Chapter 2

The Prisoner Says No to Big Brother, CounterPunch, https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/03/04/the-prisoner-says-no-to-big-brother/ (4 March 2019)

quoted in Vikram Sampath - Savarkar, Echoes from a Forgotten Past, 1883–1924 (2019)

The Judge to Robert G. Ingersoll
"Beyond" (1933)

June 1940 speech. (Mahatma Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Publications Division Government of India, 1999), vol. 78, p. 349. https://www.gandhiservefoundation.org/about-mahatma-gandhi/collected-works-of-mahatma-gandhi/
1940s

1990s, Resignation Address (1991)

James Inverne in his article Burkard Schliessmann in STEINWAY & SONS International Pianos Magazine 2008, p. 34

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Individual Culture, p. 264

Minute on Education http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html (1835)
Minute on Indian Education (1835)

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section V On The Method Respecting The Sensuous And The Intellectual In Metaphysics

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section V On The Method Respecting The Sensuous And The Intellectual In Metaphysics

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section V On The Method Respecting The Sensuous And The Intellectual In Metaphysics

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section V On The Method Respecting The Sensuous And The Intellectual In Metaphysics

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section IV On The Principle Of The Form Of The Intelligible World

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section II On The Distinction Between The Sensible And The Intelligible Generally

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section II On The Distinction Between The Sensible And The Intelligible Generally

volume II, chapter XXI: "General Summary and Conclusion", page 405 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=422&itemID=F937.2&viewtype=image
Closing paragraph of the book.
The Descent of Man (1871)

Patrick L. McGuire, Her Strong Enchantments Failing (p. 95)
Short fiction, The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)

Esoteric Christianity (The Lesser Mysteries) (1914)

The Ageless Wisdom (1897)

The Beast of Property (1884)

Moses Mendelssohn, in his Philosophical Writings (1755–77) [original in German]
M - R

Source: The Nature and Authority of Scripture (1995), p. 23

Dr. Mujeeb, in p. 75.
About Zakir Hussain, Quest for Truth (1999)

In, p. 244.
Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures

Indira Gandhi, the former Prime Minister of India quoted in [Cahn, R.W., The Coming of Materials Science, http://books.google.com/books?id=CCmJMr_K5NIC&pg=PA234, 16 March 2001, Elsevier, 978-0-08-052942-4, 272]

Lord Campbell, Lives of the Chief Justices, Vol. 1, 338.
About, The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904)

The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.
Source: Isaiah's Job (1936), II

(Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica) … What is implicit in this sentence? This is implicit: the fulfillment of existence takes place in the manner in which we become aware of reality; the whole energy of our being is ultimately directed toward attainment of insight. The perfectly happy person, the one whose thirst has been finally quenched, who has attained beatitude—this person is the one who sees. The happiness, the quenching, the perfection, consists in this seeing.
Source: Happiness and Contemplation (1958), p. 58

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), The New Downing Street (April 15, 1850)

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/186/mode/1up p. 186

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/77/mode/1up pp. 77-78

With a shake of his poor little head he replied,
"Oh, Willow, titwillow, titwillow!"
The Suicide's Grave (from The Mikado).
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Procunier v. Martinez, 416 U.S. 396 (1974) (Concurring opinion).

Inspirations : Meditations from The Artist's Way (2001), "Invocation"

Napoleon the Little (1852), Conclusion, Part Second, I
Napoleon the Little (1852)

Vygotsky, in his dissertation thesis Psychology of Art [original in Russian]

Source: A Room with a View (1908), Ch. 3

A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
pp. 48-49
Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)

remarks (2 May 1956) at a Caltech YMCA lunch forum http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/49/2/Religion.htm

The Comic
1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Books, Letters and Social Aims http://www.rwe.org/comm/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=5&id=74&Itemid=149 (1876)

§ 28
On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination (480 AD)

Preface, p. 7-8
1910s, Art, 1912

Section 6 : Higher Life
Life and Destiny (1913)

[1993, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, Quest Books, xxxi, 978-0-8356-0587-8]
Miscellaneous, Religion

[1995, Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy, Sophia: The Journal of Traditional Studies, 1, 1, 8]
Miscellaneous, Revelation

But this rejection of the philosophers also “leads him to an equally indignant rejection of their [the philosophers] natural sciences. Their geometry, astronomy, logic, and mathematics are useless as far as the hereafter is concerned and fall therefore within the category of ‘inconsequential things’ [mā lā ya‘nī].”
Ibn, Warraq (2017). The Islam in Islamic terrorism: The importance of beliefs, ideas, and ideology. ch 15, quoting Yohanan Friedmann, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi, An Outline of His Thought and a Study of His Image in the Eyes of Posterity (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1971), 53ff

Sermons Preached in Westminster Abbey
1917
Macmillan, London
https://archive.org/details/sermonspreached00charuoft/page/4

Source: The Rose of Paracelsus (2015), p. 197

[2006, Gnosis: Divine Wisdom, World Wisdom, 36, 978-1-933316-18-5]
Human being, Intellect

[2014, In the Face of the Absolute, World Wisdom, 27, 978-1-936597-41-3]
Human being, Intellect

Source: Silence Speaks, from the chalkboard of Baba Hari Dass (1977)

q. 2, art. 3, arg. 19
This is known as the Peripatetic axiom.
De veritate (c. 1256–1259)

Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2002), p. 112

Original: (la) Lex naturae […] nihil aliud est nisi lumen intellectis insitum nobis a Deo, per quod cognoscimus quid agendum et quid vitandum. Hoc lumen et hanc legem dedit Deus homini in creatione.
Source: On the Ten Commandments (c. 1273) Art. 1

Original: (it) Qualsiasi difficoltà, piccola o grande che sia, stimola l'intelletto a trovare una soluzione.
Source: prevale.net

Original: (it) Quando l'intelletto si fonde con esperienza, creatività, cultura e curiosità, forma una persona di un altro livello.
Source: prevale.net

A Million Thoughts (2016)

Autobiography (1873)
Context: What we principally thought of, was to alter people's opinions; to make them believe according to evidence, and know what was their real interest, which when they once knew, they would, we thought, by the instrument of opinion, enforce a regard to it upon one another. While fully recognizing the superior excellence of unselfish benevolence and love of justice, we did not expect the regeneration of mankind from any direct action on those sentiments, but from the effect of educated intellect, enlightening the selfish feelings.

Original: Adattarsi non significa rassegnarsi, ma saper agire d'intelletto.
Source: prevale.net

Original: Chi non ammette i propri errori, confermati da prove, fatti ed eventi, è dotato di scarso intelletto.
Source: prevale.net

Original: L'intelletto, come l'attrazione, seduzione ed eleganza di una donna, sono qualità innate.
Source: prevale.net

Original: Con il pensiero si fanno grandi passi avanti, con l'intelletto si arriva ovunque.

Source: prevale.net

Original: La donna indomabile ha quel fascino di ribellione, peraltro sintomo di intelletto, che rimane scolpito nella mente.
Source: prevale.net

Original: La bellezza di una donna è una combinazione di valori: intelletto, simpatia, sensualità, fisico, semplicità, dolcezza, fascino, eleganza, trasgressione, passione e cultura. Valori che la rendono unica nella sua natura.
Source: prevale.net

Original: Una delle qualità più attraenti di una persona, anche nella sfera sessuale, è l'intelletto.
Source: prevale.net

Original: Se metà dell'umanità avesse l'intelletto di un cane e riuscisse ad esprimere il suo amore, il mondo sarebbe sicuramente migliore.
Source: prevale.net