Jack Kerouac Quotes

I don't consider myself an intellectual. And this is not one of my aims. But I admire intellectual people.

I am probably a pseudo-intellectual.

Am I an intellectual? I don't think so. Less than people sometimes think, I have to say. But more than some others think.

The term "intellectual" is used conventionally to refer to people who happen to have unusual opportunities in this regard, and as always, opportunity confers moral responsibility.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

I read books like mad, but I am careful to to let anything I read influence me.

We're all idiots when we're young. We don't think we are, but we are. So we should be.

To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.

I'm quite intellectual. I read a lot and I'm very politically aware.

Race does not come into it. It is pure religion and culture. Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam. That would have been a fair comparison.

A second-class mind dealing with third-class material is hardly a necessity of life.

I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.

Whether the person should then be called "an intellectual" seems to reduce the issue to a question of terminology.

Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year.

I'm not what you call your basic intellectual.

It is, indeed, only in old age that intellectual men attain their sublime expression, whilst portraits of them in their youth show only the first traces of it.

The backwardness of our religious and social developments is undoubtedly holding back the development of the intellectual and political levels.

Americans are genuinely and profoundly anti-intellectual. They are especially so in their pleasure-seeking, which is epically banal.

It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

Take it from me, whenever you see a bunch of buggers puttering around talking about truth and beauty and the best way of attacking Ethics, you can bet your sandals it's all because dozens of other poor buggers are doing all the real work around the place.

The education is the answer to everything, really, and on so many different levels. The minutiae of life require analytical skills that you learn in being educated, an ability to navigate the very systems that constitute life. They all require some degree of education, and if you don't get it, you're at a real disadvantage.

Intellect needs to be understood not as some kind of claim against the other human excellences for which a fatally high price has to be paid, but rather as a complement to them without which they cannot be fully consummated.

If you don't set your writing - teaching - at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop their intellectual muscle.

I would by no means wish a daughter of mine to be a progeny of learning.