43 Inspiring Quotes On Intellect

In a world driven by knowledge and ideas, the power of intellect serves as a beacon, guiding us through the complexities of life. Intellect is not just about cognitive ability; it's about the wisdom, curiosity, and insight that shape our understanding of the world. It prompts us to explore, question, and innovate, pushing the boundaries of what is possible. To honor this remarkable human faculty, we’ve gathered a selection of 43 inspiring quotes that celebrate the essence of intellect. These quotes, from great thinkers past and present, offer reflections on the beauty of a curious mind and the journey of lifelong learning. Dive in, and let these words spark new ideas and perspectives.

1. “I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.” - Oscar Wilde

2. “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.” - Henry David Thoreau

3. “Burn worldly love, rub the ashes and make ink of it, make the heart the pen, the intellect the writer, write that which has no end or limit.” - Guru Nanak

4. “He's one fry short of a Happy Meal.” - Rush Limbaugh

5. “I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” - Antonio Gramsci

6. “Is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks.” - Herman Melville

7. “Intellect is a part of a good faith. Intellect is the light, the heart is the direction.” - Tariq Ramadan

8. “I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

9. “The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.” - Siri Hustvedt

10. “How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

11. “Google' is not a synonym for 'research'.” - Dan Brown

12. “...and the vessel was not full, his intellect was not satisfied, his soul was not at peace, his heart was not still.” - Hermann Hesse

13. “There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses.” - Oscar Wilde

14. “My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failures.” - Oscar Wilde

15. “It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of te chest beneath that makes them seem so.” - C.S. Lewis

16. “And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect.” - Leo Tolstoy

17. “I have a realistic grasp of my own strengths and weaknesses. My mind is my weapon. My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer, and I have my mind… and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge. That’s why I read so much, Jon Snow.” - George R.R. Martin

18. “Muscle is good, but craft is better” - Wace

19. “It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then is he caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

20. “...When a man first awakens, it sometimes takes several moments before he starts thinking clearly.""And here I thought it took several years, perhaps a lifetime for the average man's intellect to kick in.” - Karen Marie Moning

21. “As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.” - Sigmund Freud

22. “Man's mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild.” - James Allen

23. “أن التهميش الفكري والسياسي ليس إلا الشرط الأول والضروري للتكديح ولا معنى له إلا به  ” - برهان غليون

24. “كل الحركات العربية الحديثة  ليست إلا حركة واحدة الواحدة  لتكديح الشعب  اي تحويل الشعب الى عمالة مأجورة ورثّة هنا بالضرورة  من اجل رفع وتعظيم الفائض الاقتصادي والتكديح لا يعني فقط فصل المنتج عن وسائل الانتاج ولا بالضرورة تحرير قوة العمل لدفعها الى سوق العمل لكنه تجريد كلي للمنتج عن كل نظام عقلي ومباديء وقيم وعن كل سلطة سياسية لتكوين قوة عمل مجردة ومكرسة في حياتها الفانية والأبدية للإنتاج  ” - برهان غليون

25. “يختار المثقف العربي تلقائيا الحضارة ضد الوحشية الشعبية التقشفية، والحداثة ضد المحافظة ويطالب بفتح خزائن الحضارة للجميع أي أولا له بالذات ” - برهان غليون

26. “يقود الغاء التنظيمات السياسية هنا كما في أمكنة اخرى الى تنمية وتدعيم حزب الجامع والكنيسة  ” - برهان غليون

27. “But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal line which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not int he intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.” - Marcel Proust

28. “Arousal begins within the mind, then seeps out where fantasy propels physicality.” - Kristie LeVangie

29. “Since art is a virtue of the intellect, it demands to communicate with the entire universe of the intellect. Hence it is that the normal climate of art is intelligence and knowledge: its normal soil, the civilized heritage of a consistent and integrated system of beliefs and values; its normal horizon , the infinity of human experience enlighted by the passionate insight of anguish or the intellectual virtues of a contemplative mind.” - Jacques Maritain

30. “Upon the one thing every writer absolutely must have, and that is intellectual curiosity.” - Phillip Athans

31. “I've always believed in instinct over intellect. The instinct is what you always knew; intellect is what you figure out.” - Michka Assayas

32. “The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.” - Philip Guedalla

33. “[T]he more clamour we make about 'the women's point of view', the more we rub it into people that the women's point of view is different, and frankly I do not think it is -- at least in my job. The line I always want to take is, that there is the 'point of view' of the reasonably enlightened human brain, and that this is the aspect of the matter which I am best fitted to uphold.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

34. “Allow intelligent design into science textbooks, lecture halls, and laboratories, and the cost to the frontier of scientific discovery—the frontier that drives the economies of the future—would be incalculable. I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson

35. “Growth of consciousness does not depend on the might of the intellect but on the conviction of the heart.” - Wayne Gerard Trotman

36. “It is better to have a fair intellect that is well used, than a powerful one that is idle.” - Bryant McGill

37. “A certain amount of reverie is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It soothes the fever, occasionally high, of the brain at work, and produces in the mind a soft, fresh vapor that corrects the all too angular contours of pure thought, fills up the gaps and intervals here and there, binds them together, and dulls the sharp corners of ideas. But too much reverie submerges and drowns. Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie it's pleasure. To replace thought with reverie is to confound poison with nourishment.” - Victor Hugo

38. “The very fact of having fixed conclusions to strive for in orthodox belief does not render the Christian philosopher dogmatic but rather intellectually fruitful, willing to take and follow reason further than the putatively undogmatic unbelieving philosopher” - Gregory B. Sadler

39. “Dwelling much on the contemplation of little things, [we] are in danger of losing the intellectual appetite.” - L.H. Sigourney

40. “My intellect was my greatest vanity.” - Dan Simmons

41. “The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” - Charles Darwin

42. “Our intellect is not intended to be an end in itself, but only a means to the very mind of God.” - Ravi Zacharias

43. “God created hand, head, and heart; the hand for the deed, the head for the world, the heart for mysticism.” - Abraham Kuyper