Quotes about Intellect

For what you have really done in your handling of the evidence for belief in God, is to set yourself up as God. You have made the reach of your intellect, the standard of what is possible or not possible. You have thereby virtually determined that you intend never to meet a fact that points to God. Facts, to be facts at all—facts, that is, with decent scientific and philosophic standing—must have your stamp instead of that of God upon them as their virtual creator.

He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.

Beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty: so that "good" means that which simply pleases the appetite; while the "beautiful" is something pleasant to apprehend.

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.

Reason is flawless, de jure, but reasoners are not, de facto.

Keep up the fires of thought, and all will go well.

But does that mean that war and violence are inevitable? I would argue not because we have also evolved this amazingly sophisticated intellect, and we are capable of controlling our innate behavior a lot of the time.

Man is a reasoning animal.

He wrote as a young man that God's noblest gift was the gift of an inquiring mind.

When we possess solely a head knowledge, two things can happen: (1) we are easily susceptible to hype or emotionalism, or (2) we are bound by our intellect.

Wonder is the desire of knowledge.

An English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, 'What's your alma mater?' I told him, 'Books.