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Intellect Quotes

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Intellect Quotes

“The self you have betrayed is your mind; self-esteem is reliance on one’s power to think. The ego you seek, that essential “you” which you cannot express or define, is not your emotions or inarticulate dreams, but your intellect, that judge of your supreme tribunal whom you’ve impeached in order to drift at the mercy of any stray shyster you describe as your “feeling.””

“If martyrdom is now on the decline, it is not because martyrs are less zealous, but because martyr-mongers are more wise. The light of intellect has put out the fire of persecution, as other fires are observed to smoulder before the light of the same.”

“Our inner guidance comes to us through our feelings and body wisdom first - not through intellectual understanding. The intellect works best in service to our intuition, our inner guidance, soul, God or higher power - whichever term we choose for the spiritual energy that animates life.”

“The Holy Spirit, out of compassion for our weakness, comes to us even when we are impure. And if He finds our intellect truly praying to Him, He enters it and puts to flight the whole array of thoughts and ideas circling within it, and He arouses it to a longing for spiritual prayer.”

“If a photographic plate under the center of a lens focused on the heavens is exposed for hours, it comes to reveal stars so far away that even the most powerful telescopes fail to reveal them to the naked eye. In a similar way, time and concentration allow the intellect to perceive a ray of light in the darkness of the most complex problem.”

“Commemoration of Gilbert of Sempringham, Founder of the Gilbertine Order, 1189 Some there are who presume so far on their wits that they think themselves capable of measuring the whole nature of things by their intellect, in that they esteem all things true which they see, and false which they see not. Accordingly, in order that man's mind might be freed from this presumption, and seek the truth humbly, it was necessary that certain things far surpassing his intellect should be proposed to man by God.”

“Man is an intellectual animal, and therefore an everlasting contradiction to himself. His senses centre in himself, his ideas reach to the ends of the universe; so that he is torn in pieces between the two, without a possibility of its ever being otherwise.”

“My career as a critic still lay in the future but unconsciously I may have been preparing for it. They were not easy companions, these intellectuals I was now getting to know. They were overbearing and arrogant, excessively competitive; they lacked magnanimity and often they lacked common courtesy. But they were intellectually energetic and - this particularly attracted me - they were proof against cant.”

“There are innumerable instances suggesting that modern intellectuals do not believe themselves, that they don't really believe what they say, that they say certain things only in order to assure themselves that they possess opinions and ideas that are different from those that are entertained by the common herd of men.”