#intellect

Average intelligence loves blinders, which facilitate an even trot; but a brisker and livelier intelligence desires uncertainty, risk, a play of more deceptive and elusive forces...where one can preserve flight, pride, joke, confession, rapture, play, struggle. ↗

— Witold Gombrowicz

#intellect #intelligence #thinking-for-yourself #freedom

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

#genius #intellect #proust #seed #social

The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch. ↗

— Herman Melville

#heart #intellect #men

She was no intellectual, but men were scrupulous about avoiding intellectual women unless they had the sense to keep it well hidden. ↗

— Margaret Way

#men #smart #women #men

...There, as the sacred mysteries tell us, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones occupy the first places; but, unable to yield to them, and impatient of any second place, let us emulate their dignity and glory. And, if we will it, we shall be inferior to them in nothing. ↗

— Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

#motivational #religion #motivational

There is in every intellect a natural exigency for a true concept of God: we are born with the thirst to know and to see Him, and therefore it cannot be otherwise. ↗

— Thomas Merton

#intellect #knowledge #nature

In living this way, we discover new opportunities for comfort and enjoyment. Where the younger person may have tossed and turned throughout a sleepless night, the older man or woman can possibly feel the pleasure that comes from lying on a good mattress, resting one's weary bones and overcharged intellect, whether or not one sleeps throughout the hours of darkness. ↗

— Irving Singer

#insomnia #nature #overcharged-intellect #spirit #nature

You want us all to be snake-charmers and scorpion-eaters," he raged, at one point in their conversation ... "Naturally," Eunice replied in her most provoking manner. "It would be far preferable to being a nation of tenth-rate pseudo-civilized rug-sellers. ↗

— Paul Bowles

#nature

فكرة الحداثة والعلمانية والتنوير فكرة متأخرة عن الثورة العلمية بقرنيين على الأقل وهي نتيجة الثورة العلمية ومعلولهاوليست شرطها وعلتها ↗

— أبو يعرب المرزوقي

#hermeneutics #intellectual #literature #mind #philosophy

God created hand, head, and heart; the hand for the deed, the head for the world, the heart for mysticism. ↗

— Abraham Kuyper

#god #intellect #mysticism #religion #soul