Primacy Of The Intellect Quotes

For two thousand years or more man has been subjected to a systematic effort to transform him into an ascetic animal. He remains a pleasure-seeking animal. ~ Norman O. Brown

Endowed with a clear intellect, warm in affection, and confiding in friendship, he was from the boyhood devoted heart and soul to the Prophet. Simple, quiet, and unambitious, when in after days he obtained the rule of half of the Moslem world, it was rather thrust upon him than sought ~ William Muir

Books are at the core of what we are.... without them, we are husks of what we can, and most definitely will be because of our sense of intellect, empathy and perseverance through these hard times.. ~ Jack Bailey

In all the disputes which have excited Christians against each other, Rome has invariably decided in favor of that opinion which tended most towards the suppression of the human intellect and the annihilation of the reasoning powers. ~ Voltaire

The foundation of wisdom is knowing how to tell when you are totally clueless, lost, and in need of assistance. ~ A.E. Samaan

Ideas and statutes that live only in disembodied intellect are fragile, easily manipulated by both sides in a debate. This is as true of European "sustainability" regulations as it is for Amazonian súmac káusai removed from its forest home. Knowledge gained through extended bodily relationship with the forest, including the forest's human communities, is more robust.
... There is truth that cannot be accessed through intellect alone, especially intellect that is not aware of local ecological variations. ~ David George Haskell

Nietzsche is absolutely correct, even more correct today than when he wrote it in Thus Spake Zarathustra: I looked all about me for human beings but all I saw were fragments, deformed creatures with too much eye or too much ear. This is what the modern culture of specialized intellect-the kind of one-sidedness that banausic utilitarianism alone can value-works so hard to produce. ~ Kenny Smith

Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It's there, even when he can't see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon It will keep you free - not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects around you. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Intellect is the virtue of ignoring one's emotions' attempt to contaminate one's opinions. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth. ~ Carl Jung

She was the kind of elegance
That would never tarnish.
A mixture of lace and mesh,
Like a classic heirloom that begged to be worn.
She was sharp intellect and quick wit.
The type of woman that spoke her mind,
Even if it shook.
(Or even if no one was listening.)
She was beautiful.
But not someone you'd see in magazines,
Her hips were too wide, her hair a mess of wispy tendrils,
(Rather, she was actually very ordinary.)
My, was she stubborn! She'd drive you mad!
(Sometimes, you'd probably call her crazy.)
But mostly, her laughter was a joyful moments.
Like a warm towel fresh from the dryer,
Or finding a twenty-dollar bill in your winter coat.
And that was the true revelation.
That magic does exist,
It ran through her like a wild, fiery current. ~ M.J. Abraham

The light of common sense is fundamentally the same light as that of science, that is to say, the natural light of the intellect. But in common sense this light does not return upon itself by critical reflection, and is not perfected by what we shall learn to know as a scientific habit. ~ Jacques Maritain

I know what those who want to interrupt the beneficent, healthy sleep of the people really want. They constantly cry to the people: 'Wake up! Become conscious! Be smart!' - and even as they pretend that the extraordinary increase in the number of schools, and the creation of a proud class of teachers in consequence, satisfies a powerful need for education, I know their real goal. They are fighting, and this is how they fight, against the natural hierarchy in the empire of the intellect; they seek to destroy the roots of the highest and noblest cultural powers that, bursting forth from the popular unconscious, have a maternal destiny: to give birth to, raise, and nurture genius. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born with a precocious scientific intellect and a thirst for chemical knowledge, Elion had completed a master's degree in chemistry from New York University in 1941 while teaching high school science during the day and preforming her research for her thesis at night and on the weekends. Although highly qualified, talented, and driven, she had been unable to find a job in an academic laboratory. Frustrated by repeated rejections, she had found a position as a supermarket product supervisor. When Hitchings found Trudy Elion, who would soon become on of the most innovative synthetic chemists of her generation (and a future Nobel laureate), she was working for a food lab in New York, testing the acidity of pickles and the color of egg yolk going into mayonnaise. Rescued from a life of pickles and mayonnaise ... ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

The jury's still out on your level of intellect. After all, you signed up with Evil Incorporated in the first place. ~ Katherine McIntyre

There is ... a contemporary trend to make a sort of 'common intellect' out of society and forbid man his own independent access to truth. All is culture-clouded, and society as the climate of thought is the cause of our thoughts. But in Thomas's theory a man can transcend his environment just as he can transcend the material conditions surrounding any essence; material conditions will be his point of departure, and yet arrival at the truth or being of whatever he is studying is not ruled out. As an unlimited power, man's intellect opens man to the infinite, although only love reaches it. The relation of each man to transcendent existence in his knowing and living experience - this is the ground of objectivity. ~ Mary T. Clark

But such a life will be higher than mere human nature, because a man
will live thus, not in so far as he is man but in so far as there is in
him a divine Principle: and in proportion as this Principle excels
his composite nature so far does the Working thereof excel that in
accordance with any other kind of Excellence: and therefore, if pure
Intellect, as compared with human nature, is divine, so too will the
life in accordance with it be divine compared with man's ordinary life.
[Sidenote: 1178a] Yet must we not give ear to those who bid one as man
to mind only man's affairs, or as mortal only mortal things; but, so far
as we can, make ourselves like immortals and do all with a view to
living in accordance with the highest Principle in us, for small as it
may be in bulk yet in power and preciousness it far more excels all the
others. ~ Aristotle.

He worshipped at the temple of her intellect and I believe it was a comfort to him to know that she left our world with it still shining. ~ Matthew Pearl

The differences which exist between every one of our real impressions -- differences which explain why a uniform depiction of life cannot bear much resemblance to the reality -- derive probably from the following cause: the slightest word that we have said, the most insignificant action that we have performed at anyone epoch of our life was surrounded by, and colored by the reflection of things which logically had no connection with it and which later have been separated from it by our intellect which could make nothing of it for its own rational purposes, things, however, in the midst of which -- here the pink reflection of the evening upon the flower-covered wall of a country restaurant, a feeling of hunger, the desire for women, the pleasure of luxury; here the blue volutes of the morning sea and, enveloped in them, phrases of music half emerging like the shoulders of water-nymphs -- the simplest act or gesture remains immured as within a thousand vessels, each one of them filled with things of a color, a scent, a temperature that are absolutely different one from another, vessels, moreover, which being disposed over the whole range of our years, during which we have never ceased to change if only in our dreams and our thoughts, are situated at the most various moral altitudes and give us the sensation of extraordinarily diverse atmospheres. ~ Marcel Proust

I believe that in every person is a kind of circuit which resonates to intellectual discovery-and the idea is to make that resonance work ~ Carl Sagan

Socrates and Plato are right: whatever man does he always does well, that is, he does that which seems to him good (useful) according to the degree of his intellect, the particular standard of his reasonableness. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I cannot understand why the poets of our day wax indignant at the vulgarity of their age and complain of having come into the world too early or too late. I believe that every man of intellect can create his own beautiful fable of life. ~ Gabriele D'Annunzio

But in their defense of the supernatural, fundamentalists and their evangelical heirs resemble some cancer patients. In facing a drastic disease, they are willing to undertake a drastic remedy. The treatment of fundamentalism may be said to have succeeded; the patient survived. But at least for the life of the mind, what survived was a patient horribly disfigured by the cure itself. ~ Mark A. Noll

He had sent her to the British school, which had a good standard of teaching. And at home, through his guidance, she had become as well-read as her brother. He liked to joke about this, tell her that her intellect shamed them all. But at some point, it seemed, he was content to let her grandmother and mother's plans for her take over. Sometimes she feels that she has become a half-developed thing, a sort of freak. Too educated to be content with the usual lot of her sex, but not enough to do anything with it. At her most angry she decided that her education had been a pastime for her father, an amusement. ~ Lucy Foley

Nor is it in fact a purely human knowledge bound by the context and categories of the human mind. Rather, metaphysics, which some of his translators render as metaphysic in order to emphasize its non-multiple but unitary nature, is the science of Ultimate Reality, attainable through the intellect and not reason, of an essentially suprahuman character and including in its fullness the whole of man's being. It is a sacred science or scientia sacra, a wisdom which liberates and which requires not only certain mental capacities but also moral and spiritual qualifications. It ~ Frithjof Schuon

To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When your intellect, once perverted by listening to all manner of arguments, is totally absorbed in the contemplation of God, you will then attain yoga. When a person is firmly established in samadhi - samadhi means fixing the mind on God - he is filled with ecstatic love and, therefore, can be completely indifferent to this world. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

I remembered a few things about waking. I remembered the sense of surprise as dream life and waking life swapped primacy, and the way in which the most tangible and deeply involving dreams could bleach entirely away. ~ Alex Garland

Genius is the very eye of intellect and the wing of thought; it is always in advance of its time, and is the pioneer for the generation which it precedes. ~ William Gilmore Simms

The most excellent study of expanding the soul, is the science of Christ, and Him crucified, and the knowledge of the Godhead in the glorious Trinity. ~ J.I. Packer

We must suit the flattery to the mind and taste of the recipient. We do not put essences into hogsheads, nor porter into phials. Delicate minds may be disgusted by compliments that would please a grosser intellect; as some fine ladies who would be shocked at the idea of a dram will not refuse a liqueur. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. And ~ Leo Tolstoy

The universes which are amenable to the intellect can never satisfy the instincts of the heart. ~ Anonymous

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers. ~ Pat Conroy

I do not believe that Obama is smarter than anybody else. I do not believe he has cut a new path and is a politician unlike any we've ever seen regarding his intellect. I don't believe any of this hocus-pocus. I didn't believe it when they said it about Hillary, Smartest Woman in the World. ~ Rush Limbaugh

Total surrender to the will of God actually is sacrificing oneself as a burnt offering to God. The proof of this state is dying to oneself, - to one's own opinions, wishes and feelings or tastes, in order to live by Divine intellect, in conformity with the Divine will and in partaking of God. In the forefront of this endeavor is our Lord and Savior. He surrendered the whole of Himself to God the Father, and us in Himself, 'For we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones' (Eph. 5:30). So let us hasten in His footsteps? ~ Lorenzo Scupoli

The intellect searches out the Absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God, and without the colors of affection. The intellectual and the active powers seem to succeed each other, and the exclusive activity of the one generates the exclusive activity of the other. There is something unfriendly in each to the other, but they are like the alternate periods of feeding and working in animals; each prepares and will be followed by the other. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

He simply had to trust the dogs. On the hunt, man and dogs were always a team.
With Jesse, perhaps this was more true than with most. Most men, knowing themselves to be a lot smarter than the dogs, often overruled their judgment. Jesse, not thinking himself much smarter than anything, did not. He often relied upon his own instincts. He
therefore had more respect for instinct, perhaps, than a man who normally relied upon intellect. The mind of the dog was in many ways as simple and uncomplicated as Jesse's own. He was taught to memorize actions in places he couldn't reason, and
obey in situations that he did not understand. When he did understand he followed his instinct. His instincts assured him that as hunter, the dog was at least the equal of man. And for scenting and tracking, the dog was superior. ~ Pamela Morsi

The doors of perception doesn't open with the intellect ~ Syed Sharukh

There is no such thing as being just a girl. You are a goddess, an extension of beauty and intellect itself. Within you funnels the true power of all, and under those pretty little hairs is a mind far more vast than any man could understand... ~ Robinson Pyles

She eyes him warily. Exactly the same way she did when he came into her office
years ago.
It comes into his mind to wonder why she is always so alert in his presence. In
college, he used to think that she was afraid of his intellect, but he's known
for years that this is the last of her worries. At Black Sun Systems, he
figured that it was just typical female guardedness -- Juanita was afraid he was
trying to get her into the sack. But this, too, is pretty much out of the
question.
At this late date in his romantic career, he is just canny enough to come up
with a new theory: She's being careful because she likes him. She likes him in
spite of herself. He is exactly the kind of tempting but utterly wrong romantic
choice that a smart girl like Juanita must learn to avoid.
That's definitely it. There's something to be said for getting older. ~ Neal Stephenson

The deepest yearning of human beings seems to be a constellation in which the two poles (motherliness and fatherliness, female and male, mercy and justice, feeling and thought, nature and intellect) are united in a synthesis, in which both sides of the polarity lose their antagonism and, instead, color each other. ~ Erich Fromm