Quotes about Intellect
Man by Nature desires to know.
— Aristotle
A man with so large a brain must have something in it.
— Arthur Conan Doyle
Wonder is the desire of knowledge.
— St. Thomas Aquinas
The human mind may perceive truth only through thinking, as is clear from Augustine.
— St. Thomas Aquinas
For this reason truth is defined by the conformity of intellect and thing; and hence to know this conformity is to know truth.
— St. Thomas Aquinas
For there are some who have such a presumptuous opinion of their own ability that they deem themselves able to measure the nature of everything; I mean to say that, in their estimation, everything is true that seems to them so, and everything is false that does not. So that the human mind, therefore, might be freed from this presumption and come to a humble inquiry after truth, it was necessary that some things should be proposed to man by God that would completely surpass his intellect.
— St. Thomas Aquinas
Objection 1: It seems that God does not know evil things. For the Philosopher (De Anima iii) says that the intellect which is not in potentiality does not know privation. But "evil is the privation of good," as Augustine says (Confess. iii, 7). Therefore, as the intellect of God is never in potentiality, but is always in act, as is clear from the foregoing (A[2] ), it seems that God does not know evil things.
— St. Thomas Aquinas
A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.
— Henry Ward Beecher
What is sweeter than lettered ease?
— Cicero
Mr. Oscar Browning was a great figure in Cambridge at one time, and used to examine the students at Girton and Newnham. Mr. Oscar Browning was wont to declare "that the impression left on his mind, after looking over any set of examination papers, was that, irrespective of the marks he might give, the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man.
— Virginia Woolf
The weight, the pace, the stride of a man's mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully. The ape is too distant to be sedulous.
— Virginia Woolf
and he glanced at the backs of the books, with an awakened curiosity that went below the binding. No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.
— Charles Dickens