Intellectual Appreciation Quotes

I love libraries, as anyone who has a brain does.

The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a woman.

Kings were wont to honour philosophers, but if I had such I would honour them as angels.

Love is admiring with the heart. And admiring is loving with the mind.

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

I do love animals so much, and have a great respect for them emotionally and intellectually, because they are so different from human beings.

When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room. Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical.

When a nation gives birth to a man who is able to produce a great thought, another is born who is able to understand and admire it.

It took an entire generation of critical thinking for Douglas Sirk's films to be really appreciated.

Marty was an extraordinary person. Of all the boys I had dated, he was the only one who really cared that I had a brain. And he was always - well, making me feel that I was better than I thought I was.

A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics or in trade, gains largely in our esteem if we discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill.

One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality.

No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.

We may like well to know what is Plato’s and what is Montesquieu’s or Goethe’s part, and what thought was always dear to the writer himself; but the worth of the sentences consists in their radiancy and equal aptitude to all intelligence. They fit all our facts like a charm. We respect ourselves the more that we know them.

There is no surer mark of the absence of the highest moral and intellectual qualities than a cold reception of excellence.

I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk.

Without sounding overly sentimental about the process, I'd say trying to describe how you tend to conceive of a book is like describing how you tend to fall in love.

The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.

The written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country.