Authors are the vanguard in the march of mind, the intellectual backwoodsmen, reclaiming from the idle wilderness new territories for the thought and activity of their happier brethren.
Wisdom is corrupted by ambition, even when the quality of the ambition is intellectual. For ambition, even of this quality, is but a form of self-love.
The intellectual is not defined by professional group and type of occupation. Nor are good upbringing and a good family enough in themselves to produce an intellectual. An intellectual is a person whose interest in and preoccupation with the spiritual side of life are insistent and constant and not forced by external circumstances, even flying in the face of them. An intellectual is a person whose thought is nonimitative.
Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.
It is only the constant exertion and working of our sensitive, intellectual, moral, and physical machinery that keeps us from rusting, and so becoming useless.
My point is that the alienation of theory and practice, intellectual and manual labor, is a real issue, but it's the outcome of social domination; it's sort of a mistake to blame it on the subjects of that domination.
Most men use their knowledge only under guidance from others because they lack the courage to think independently using their own reasoning abilities. It takes intellectual daring to discover the truth.
It recognizes no morality but a sham morality meant for deceit, no honor even among thieves and of a thievish sort, no force but physical force, no intellectual power but cunning, no disgrace but failure, no crime but stupidity.
A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.
In Shankaracharya we saw tremendous intellectual power, throwing the scorching light of reason upon everything.
The joys of theory are the sweetest intellectual pleasures of life
One of the things that characterizes good intellectual work is a certain self-importance
The philosophical implication of race-thinking is that by offering us the mystery of heredity as an explanation, it diverts our attention from the social and intellectual factors that make up personality.
Genius must have talent as its complement and implement, just as in like manner imagination must have fancy. In short, the higher intellectual powers can only act through a corresponding energy of the lower.
The intellectual world is deeply conformist. . . We talk a lot about the crimes of others. When it comes to our own crimes, we are nationalists in the Orwellian sense.
Character grows in the soil of experience with the fertilization of example, the moisture of ambition, and the sunshine of satisfaction. Character cannot be purchased, bargained for, inherited, rented or imported from afar. It must be home-grown. Purely intellectual development without commensurate internal character development makes as much sense as putting a high-powered sports car in the hands of a teenager who is high on drugs. Yet all too often in the academic world, that's exactly what we do by not focusing on the character development of young people.
It's what I call "mental masturbation", when you engage is some pointless intellectual exercise that has no possible meaning.
I approached the bulk of my schoolwork as a chore rather than an intellectual adventure. The tedium was relieved by a few courses that seem to be qualitatively different. Geometry was the first exciting course I remember. Instead of memorizing facts, we were asked to think in clear, logical steps. Beginning from a few intuitive postulates, far reaching consequences could be derived, and I took immediately to the sport of proving theorems.
Intellectual effort gives me enormous pleasure
All the civilizations we know have been created and directed by small intellectual aristocracies, never by people in the mass. The power of crowds is only to destroy.