COMPASSION

Affirmation of life is the spiritual act by which man ceases to live thoughtlessly and begins to devote himself to his life
with reverence in order to give it true value.
— Albert Schweitzer

6/18/2010

Quotes Considering the Possibilities, Limits and Shortcomings of the Intellect .


I'm still working on my 'Philosophy of Mind ' definition and these are some assembled quotes: 

Psychology is the science of the intellects, characters and behavior of animals including man. 
Edward Thorndike 



On the whole, the psychological work of the last quarter of the nineteenth century emphasized the study of consciousness to the neglect of the total life of intellect and character.
Edward Thorndike

Psychology helps to measure the probability that an aim is attainable.
Edward Thorndike 

This growth in the number, speed of formation, permanence, delicacy and complexity of associations possible for an animal reaches its acme in the case of man. 
Edward Thorndike 

To the intelligent man with an interest in human nature it must often appear strange that so much of the energy of the scientific world has been spent on the study of the body and so little on the study of the mind. 
Edward Thorndike 


"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.
~Karl Von Clausewitz

As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies, as a form of abstract thought. I dont wish to deny the uses of the intellect, but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere.
J. M. Coetzee

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.
Samuel Johnson

Don't leave home without your sword - your intellect.
Alan Moore

Eighty percent of our life is emotion, and only 20 percent is intellect. I am much more interested in how you feel than how you think. I can change how you think, but how you feel is something deeper and stronger, and it's something that's inside you.
Frank Luntz

God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given us, on this side of the grave.
Francis Bacon

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

I don't dare postulate about science, but I know that it takes both emotion and intellect in order for art to happen.
Lukas Foss

I have some strategical vision, I could calculate some few moves ahead and I have an intellect that is badly missed in the country which is run by generals and colonels.
Garry Kasparov

I look upon another's insistence on the merits of his or her life - duties, intellect, accomplishment - and see that most of it is nonsense.
Harold Brodkey


I obtain great satisfaction out of using my intellect.
Temple Grandin

I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I think we actually punish children out of their relationship with their bodies... we categorically separate mind and body and emotion and intellect.
Susan Griffin

If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success.
Max Born

If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
Ray Bradbury

Intellect distinguishes between the possible and the impossible; reason distinguishes between the sensible and the senseless. Even the possible can be senseless.
Max Born

It hinders the creative work of the mind if the intellect examines too closely the ideas as they pour in.
Friedrich Schiller

It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale.
Thomas Carlyle

It is an unscrupulous intellect that does not pay to antiquity its due reverence.
Desiderius Erasmus

It is better to have a fair intellect that is well used than a powerful one that is idle.
Bryant H. McGill

It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life.
Augustus Hare

It's obvious, but perhaps worth saying, that happiness has virtually nothing to do with the state of your intellect.
Daniel Keys Moran

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.
Charles Scribner, Jr.

Luck is of little moment to the great general, for it is under the control of his intellect and his judgment.
Titus Livius

Most people say that is it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.
Albert Einstein

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
Carl Jung

On the whole, the psychological work of the last quarter of the nineteenth century emphasized the study of consciousness to the neglect of the total life of intellect and character.
Edward Thorndike

Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.
Herbert Spencer

Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.
Lionel Trilling

People desire power. I don't know why they want it so. It seems to me it implies a hugely superior intellect which separates them from most of the populace.
F. Murray Abraham

People tend not to use this word beauty because it's not intellectual - but there has to be an overlap between beauty and intellect.
Tadao Ando

Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
Jacques Maritain

Put your heart, mind, intellect and soul even to your smallest acts. This is the secret of success.
Sivananda

Sense is a line, the mind is a circle. Sense is like a line which is the flux of a point running out from itself, but intellect like a circle that keeps within itself.
Ralph Cudworth

Since it is seldom clear whether intellectual activity denotes a superior mode of being or a vital deficiency, opinion swings between considering intellect a privilege and seeing it as a handicap.
Jacques Barzun

Since the days of Abraham many men of unusual intellect not only have diligently studied the divine plan, but have devoted their lives to having a part in making it known to others.
Joseph Franklin Rutherford

Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation.
John Ruskin

Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
Henri Bergson

Some people, however long their experience or strong their intellect, are temperamentally incapable of reaching firm decisions.
James Callaghan

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
Carl Jung

The first requirement of politics is not intellect or stamina but patience. Politics is a very long run game and the tortoise will usually beat the hare.
John Major

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.
Felix Adler

The function of intellect is to provide a means of modifying our reactions to the circumstances of life, so that we may secure pleasure, the symptom of welfare.
Edward Thorndike

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.
Blaise Pascal

The Geometer has the special privilege to carry out, by abstraction, all constructions by means of the intellect. Who, then, would wish to prevent me from freely considering figures hanging on a balance imagined to be at an infinite distance beyond the confines of the world?
Evangelista Torricelli

The grinding of the intellect is for most people as painful as a dentist's drill.
Leonard Woolf

The higher the voice the smaller the intellect.
Ernest Newman

The history of philosophy is not, like the history of the sciences, to be studied with the intellect alone. That which is receptive in us and that which impinges upon us from history is the reality of man's being, unfolding itself in thought.
Karl Jaspers

The intellect is a cold thing and a merely intellectual idea will never stimulate thought in the same manner that a spiritual idea does.
Ernest Holmes

The intellect is always fooled by the heart.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

The intellect of the wise is like glass; it admits the light of heaven and reflects it.
Augustus Hare

The level of potential physical productivity of a society depends on both the development of the intellect of its members, and a minimal standard of both demographic characteristics and of consumption.
Robert Trout

The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.
Carson McCullers

The object of preaching is to constantly remind mankind of what they keep forgetting; not to supply the intellect, but to fortify the feebleness of human resolutions.
Sydney Smith

The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.
John Keats

The privileged man, whether he be privileged politically or economically, is a man depraved in intellect and heart.
Mikhail Bakunin

The relation between practical and spiritual spheres in music is obvious, if only because it demands ears, finger, consciousness and intellect.
Luciano Berio

The restriction of studies of human intellect and character to studies of conscious states was not without influence on a scientific studies of animal psychology.
Edward Thorndike

The true grandeur of humanity is in moral elevation, sustained, enlightened and decorated by the intellect of man.
Charles Sumner

The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.
Paul Valery

The University conceives of itself as dedicated to the power of the intellect. Its commitment is to the way of reason.
Edward Levi

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
Isaac Bashevis Singer

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
Sigmund Freud

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.
Victor Hugo

Through shallow intellect, the mind becomes shallow, and one eats the fly, along with the sweets.
Guru Nanak

To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.
Oscar Wilde

Traveling is the only passion that doesn't need to feel shy in front of intellect.
Lennart Meri

Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.
Karl Von Clausewitz

Vivid images are like a beautiful melody that speaks to you on an emotional level. It bypasses your logic centers and even your intellect and goes to a different part of the brain.
Steven Bochco

Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season. All great men of letters have therefore been enthusiastic walkers.
Leslie Stephen

We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
John Kenneth Galbraith

We ourselves can die with comfort and even with joy if we know that death is but a passport to blessedness, that this intellect, freed from all material chains, shall rise and shine.
Matthew Simpson

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.
Carl Jung

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
Albert Einstein

What is important is that one utilizes one's intellect and not to be 100 percent sure about one's convictions. One should always leave room for doubt.
Shirin Ebadi

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.
Walter Pater

What's right about America is that although we have a mess of problems, we have great capacity - intellect and resources - to do some thing about them.
Henry Ford

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
William James

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.
Baruch Spinoza

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.
Roger Ebert

The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of a purely objective life.
Georg Simmel

Every relationship between persons causes a picture of each to take form in the mind of the other, and this picture evidently is in reciprocal relationship with that personal relationship.
Georg Simmel

The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.
Georg Simmel

For this reason, strangers are not really conceived as individuals, but as strangers of a particular type: the element of distance is no less general in regard to them than the element of nearness.
Georg Simmel

On the one hand, life is made infinitely easy for the personality in that stimulations, interests, uses of time and consciousness are offered to it from all sides. They carry the person as if in a stream, and one needs hardly to swim for oneself.
Georg Simmel

Human beings are accustomed to think of intellect as the power of having and controlling ideas and of ability to learn as synonymous with ability to have ideas. But learning by having ideas is really one of the rare and isolated events in nature. 
Edward Thorndike 

Human education is concerned with certain changes in the intellects, characters and behavior of men, its problems being roughly included under these four topics: Aims, materials, means and methods. 
Edward Thorndike 

This growth in the number, speed of formation, permanence, delicacy and complexity of associations possible for an animal reaches its acme in the case of man.
Edward Thorndike

TOn the whole, the psychological work of the last quarter of the nineteenth century emphasized the study of consciousness to the neglect of the total life of intellect and character. 
Edward Thorndike

Psychology helps to measure the probability that an aim is attainable.
Edward Thorndike 

This growth in the number, speed of formation, permanence, delicacy and complexity of associations possible for an animal reaches its acme in the case of man. 
Edward Thorndike 

To the intelligent man with an interest in human nature it must often appear strange that so much of the energy of the scientific world has been spent on the study of the body and so little on the study of the mind. 
Edward Thorndike capacities is man a part of nature. 
Edward Thorndike 



On the whole, the psychological work of the last quarter of the nineteenth century emphasized the study of consciousness to the neglect of the total life of intellect and character.
Edward Thorndike

Psychology helps to measure the probability that an aim is attainable.
Edward Thorndike 

This growth in the number, speed of formation, permanence, delicacy and complexity of associations possible for an animal reaches its acme in the case of man. 
Edward Thorndike 

To the intelligent man with an interest in human nature it must often appear strange that so much of the energy of the scientific world has been spent on the study of the body and so little on the study of the mind. 
Edward Thorndike 

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