There is a strange fact about the human mind, a fact that differentiates the mind sharply from the body. The body is limited in ways that the mind is not. One sign of this is that the body does not continue indefinitely to grow in strength and develop in skill and grace. By the time most people are thirty years old, their bodies are as good as they will ever be; in fact, many persons' bodies have begun to deteriorate by that time. But there is no limit to the amount of growth and development that the mind can sustain. The mind does not stop growing at any particular age.
Men of learning are those who have read the contents of books. Thinkers, geniuses, and those who have enlightened the world and furthered the race of men, are those who have made direct use of the book of the world.
Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever.
We need science, more and better science, not for its technology, not for leisure, not even for health or longevity, but for the hope of wisdom which our kind of culture must acquire for its survival.
Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go.
Mathematicians stand on each others' shoulders and computer scientists stand on each others' toes.
Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.
Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.
Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.
Book - Learning : The dunce's derisive term for all knowledge that transcends his own impertinent ignorance.
We notice that the mind grows with the body, and with it decays.
I am an innovator. This is a term of distinction, a term of honor, rather than something to hide or apologize for. Anyone who has new or valuable ideas to offer stands outside the intellectual status quo. But the status quo is not a stream, let alone a 'mainstream'. It is a stagnant swamp. It is the innovators who carry mankind forward.
The march of intellect is proceeding at quick time; and if its progress be not accompanied by a corresponding improvement in morals and religion, the faster it proceeds, with the more violence will you be hurried down the road to ruin.
As far as mental development is concerned, we should never be complacent. We can develop our minds infinitely - there is no limitation.
No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.
“How does one grow up?” I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause; then she answered, “By thinking.”
As St. Paul points out, Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary, He told us to be not only "as harmless as doves," but also "as wise as serpents." He wants a child's heart, but a grown-up's head.
Brethren, do not become children in sense: but in malice be children, and in sense be perfect.
Work to perfect the mind. There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives.
You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.
An ounce of logic can be worth more than a ton of tradition that has become obsolete through the weathering of time.
Without knowledge there can be no sure progress. Vice and barbarism are the inseparable companions of ignorance. Nor is it too much to say that, except in rare instances, the highest virtue is attained only through intelligence.
Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse.
Growth in wisdom can be measured precisely by decline in bile.
The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads.
