Great Intellect Quotes

You intellectuals are always so surprised to discover how fragile your body is. The mind is so robust, so remote. But muscles and bones are as simple as tied-up straw. They unravel and snap. And the more they break, the more the mind shrinks. In the moments before the cascade into death, the great intellect is reduced to a silent kernel. The mind is nothing more than a door into the dark. ~ Josiah Bancroft

Having a great intellect is no path to being happy. ~ Stephen Fry

Fancy, an animal faculty, is very different from imagination, which is intellectual. The former is passive; but the latter is active and creative. Children, the weak minded, and the timid are full of fancy. Men and women of intellect, of great intellect, are alone possessed of great imagination. ~ Joseph Joubert

I must not hesitate to acknowledge where Europe is great, for great she is without doubt. We cannot help loving her with all our heart, and paying her the best homage of our admiration, - the Europe who, in her literature and art, pours out an inexhaustible cascade of beauty and truth fertilizing all countries and all time; the Europe who, with a mind which is titanic in its untiring power, is sweeping the height and the depth of the universe, winning her homage of knowledge from the infinitely great and the infinitely small, applying all the resources of her great intellect and heart in healing the sick and alleviating those miseries of man which up till now we were contented to accept in a spirit of hopeless resignation; the Europe who is making the earth yield more fruit than seemed possible, coaxing and compelling the great forces of nature into man's service. Such true greatness must have its motive power in spiritual strength. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

What offends a great intellect in society is the equality of rights, leading to equality of pretensions, which everyone enjoys; while at the same time, inequality of capacity means a corresponding disparity of social power. So-called good society recognizes every kind of claim but that of intellect, which is a contraband article; and people are expected to exhibit an unlimited amount of patience towards every form of folly and stupidity, perversity and dullness; whilst personal merit has to beg pardon, as it were, for being present, or else conceal itself altogether. Intellectual superiority offends by its very existence, without any desire to do so. The ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

A merely great intellect can produce prose, but not poetry, not one line. ~ Edward Thomas

After that, things happened very quickly. She gave me a key to her house, and I gave her a key to my apartment. If we were in town, we spent every weekend together. She cooked for me - she was good in the kitchen, but then she was good everywhere. We watched the Friday night fights on TV, and on Saturday or Sunday afternoons we'd go for long walks in the mountains above Malibu. Occasionally we would go to a movie, slipping in after the lights went down. Whenever we went out, Barbara [Stanwyck] would wear a scarf over her head, or a kind of hat, so it would be hard to tell who she was. For the next four years, we became part of each other's lives. In a very real way, I think we still are. Barbara proved to be one of the most marvelous relationships of my life. I was twenty-two, she was forty-five, but our ages were beside the point. She was everything to me - a beautiful woman with a great sense of humor and enormous accomplishments to her name. ~ Robert Wagner

The Showdown is a great way to bring attention to these historic Virginia tracks where many NASCAR drivers cut their teeth in stock car racing, including myself. Tracks like South Boston and Langley are the heart of the sport and draw a great crowd to our Showdown events. ~ Denny Hamlin

Girls, there are poets who learn from you
to say, what you, in your aloneness, are;
and they learn through you to live distantness,
as the evenings through the great stars
become accustomed to eternity. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Your failings cannot be so great that you cannot overcome them with faith in our Lord; he forgave me mine, he will forgive you yours. You have but to desire it. ~ Roseanna M. White

I don't make movies about issues. This is my same litmus test for all the movies I love: Is it a great character on a great emotional quest with a great emotional need? Do they overcome great emotional obstacles? Is it a fantastic story? I didn't set out to be a political activist. I'm just a human being who's moved by certain things, and if certain things break my heart, I set out to fix them. ~ Kimberly Peirce

With such irresistible evidence before us of the great and rapid progress of abolitionism without the slightest indication of abatement, he is blind who does not see, if the state of things which has caused it should be permitted to continue, that it will speedily be too late, if not to save ourselves, to save the Union. ~ John C. Calhoun

Gifts, like words, carried with them a great deal of power. They bestowed good fortune just as powerfully as they could curse; the could bind people together or tear them apart. ~ Alethea Kontis

It was great to play an ex-marine cockney thug. All my roles are as different as the colours of the rainbow. ~ Luke Treadaway

The skill, the art of literacy is a gift. To read is to watch in your mind as a single word explodes into a confetti of images. Truly, of all the gifts given to man, reading is most sacred, For from words come dreams and from dreams come great tomorrows. ~ Stephen Cosgrove

Desperation is a great giver of clarity: Bartimaeus needed no time to decide what to do next. "Jesus! Son of David!" he shouted. "Have mercy on me!" (Mark 10:47). The crowd turned to him in disgust. "Shut your mouth, son of filth!" But Bartimaeus knew what it meant to be despised. He also knew that the chance of a lifetime was literally passing him by, so he called to the Savior all the louder. (From: Bartimaeus) ~ Sherri Gragg

It was a masterpiece. Nobody bought it. (re: Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, 1844) ~ Anthony Bailey

That was an age of great men doing what was right ... This is an age of little men doing what they must. ~ Joe Abercrombie

The key question facing those of us working in the media (old and new) is whether we embrace and adapt to the radical changes brought about by the Internet or pretend that we can somehow hop into a journalistic Way Back Machine and return to a past that no longer exists and can't be resurrected. There is no question that, as the industry moves forward and we figure out the new rules of the road, there will be - and needs to be - a great deal of experimentation with new revenue models. ~ Arianna Huffington

There is no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or sadism. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

I glance around at the nest we have made, at the floorboards polished by our bare feet, at the continents of stain on the ceiling like an old and all-wrong discoverer's map, at the earnestly bloated canvases I conscientiously cover with great streaks straining to say what even I am begining to suspect is the unsayable thing, and I grow frightened. ~ John Updike

It is better to spend time in one's own company than to consort with people who have no more intelligence than the sheep and goats they herd."
Annoyed by his snobbery, Livia could not resist making a retort. "You are fortunate, then, Mr. Chamberlain. With that attitude, it seems likely that you will indeed be spending a great deal of time in your own company. ~ Lisa Kleypas

I can't understand the conditions of a corporate product being designed and getting millions. I admire it, it's great, but I don't know how to do that. I have to have the wheel. ~ Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

A Texas upbringing - and living now in Brooklyn, too - have surely helped my appreciation for open spaces and skies, but beyond that, it's not easy to find words for what it feels like to be up in the Rockies or out on the Great Basin - such silences and spaces! - or to be heading up into the Sierra Nevada Mountains. ~ Brian Floca

Sitting there in the Alabama winter with my mouth full of cold turnip and mud, I could see at least for a moment how if you ever took truly to heart the ultimate goodness and joy of things, even at their bleakest, the need to praise someone or something for it would be so great that you might even have to go out and speak of it to the birds of the air. ~ Frederick Buechner

One can write out of love or hate. Hate tells one a great deal about a person. Love makes one become the person. Love, contrary to legend, is not half as blind, at least for writing purposes, as hate. Love can see the evil and not cease to be love. Hate cannot see the good and remain hate. The writer, writing out of hatred, will, thus, paint a far more partial picture than if he had written out of love. ~ Jessamyn West

The great danger in the South comes precisely from the fact that the public is not informed. Newspapers shirk notoriously their editorial responsibilities and print what they think their readers want. They lean with the prevailing winds and employ every fallacy of logic in order to editorialize harmoniously with popular prejudices. They also keep a close eye on possible economic reprisals from the Councils and the Klans, plus other superpatriotic groups who bring pressure to bear on the newspapers' advertisers. In addition, most adhere to the long-standing conspiracy of silence about anything remotely favorable to the Negro. His achievements are carefully excluded or, when they demand attention, are handled with the greatest care to avoid the impression that anything good the individual Negro does is typical of his race. ~ John Howard Griffin

Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company. ~ Jane Austen

In God's providence we have four gospels! For Jesus Christ is too great and glorious a person to be captured by one author or one perspective. ~ John R.W. Stott

It's usually very, very hard for me to pick up a script that was written and try and see myself as a part of that, especially when you're used to performing all your own material. It's OK with drama, I like being handed great material but I think with comedy it's far more personal and probably a lot harder for me to find a fit. ~ Eric Bana

Orleans . . . the place where Joan of Arc, while depending on God, had defeated the British in a great battle for freedom.
Joan and I had a lot in common. But there would be no burning at the stake for me.
Robert would not allow it. ~ Nancy Moser

Many of the novelists I admire never left their hometown. Look at Flannery O'Connor. So many of the great Russians never left Russia. Shakespeare never left England. The list goes on. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Despite the failure of Velda Cannon's Depends, we'd had a great time. ~ Charlaine Harris

To have suffered ... sets a keen edge on what remains of the agreeable. This is a great truth and has to be learned in the fire. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Girls will go out and spend $200 or $300 dollars on a pair of shoes, but you should also be taking care of your skin. That's the first thing people see. I think it's an investment. It's a lot cheaper to use really great products now, rather than trying to fix problematic skin later on in life. That's always been my motto. ~ Keshia Knight Pulliam

I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation. ~ Richard Powers

The First, then, should be compared to light, the next [Spirit or Intellect] to the sun, and the third [soul] to the celestial body of the moon, which gets its light from the sun. (V-6-4) ~ Plotinus

He is happy as well as great who needs neither to obey nor to command in order to be something. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Next to the wicked lives of men, nothing is so great a disparagement and weakening to religion as the divisions of Christians. ~ John Tillotson

How often it is that a small action becomes great by its intention. And how often it is that a great action becomes small by its intention. ~ Abdullah Ibn Mubarak

It takes a very great intelligence to breathe logical meaning into meaningless ideas. ~ Milan Kundera

...I think a lot of my misery was me hating me, and hating me made me hate everyone else. I felt like such a punk, I felt so weak. I really was a coward. I never stood up for myself. I mean, I stood up for myself as we associate standing up for yourself -- fighting and violence. But that's not standing up for yourself. I mean standing up for myself like thinking for myself. Now, I feel more ok with myself. I'm feeling stronger in my abilities every day, and the world just opens up. You really can do anything, you can shape your life any way you want it to be. Because prison isn't the great prison. Prison is being entrapped by those self-destructive ways of thinking. ~ Laura Bates

It's not like I'm not writing great music anymore, it's just that I want to take it another level. ~ Drake

There are certain records that you love because the songs are great, but you don't go to them as an example of great production. ~ Beck