intellectual contemplation Quotes

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.

Philosophy is reason with the eyes of the soul.

The moment our discourse rises above the ground-line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that always a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought.... This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation.

Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.

Thinking goes on in your head. It is not really deep into the roots of your being; it is not your totality.

I love watching him think," Maeve told Lily. "You can almost hear that poor little hamster running and running on its wheel.

A pipe is a pocket philosopher,--a truer one than Socrates, for it never asks questions. Socrates must have been very tiresome, when one thinks of it.

A man, doubtful of his dinner, or trembling at a creditor, is not much disposed to abstracted meditation, or remote enquiries.

Society develops wit, but its contemplation alone forms genius.

The examined life has always been pretty well confined to a privileged class.

Logic , like lyrical poetry , is no employment for the middle-aged

... the word "theory" ... was originally an Orphic word, which Cornford interprets as "passionate sympathetic contemplation" ... For Pythagoras, the "passionate sympathetic contemplation" was intellectual, and issued in mathematical knowledge ... To those who have reluctantly learnt a little mathematics in school this may seem strange; but to those who have experienced the intoxicating delight of sudden understanding that mathematics gives, from time to time, to those who love it, the Pythagorean view will seem completely natural.

I'm a deep thinker when it comes to shallow no brainers.

What is addressed to us for contemplation does not threaten us, but makes us intellectual beings.

Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect:--for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action.

Thought paceth like a hoary sage, but imagination hath wings as an eagle.

Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching.

Our thinking is a pious reception.

By legend and perhaps by nature philosophers are more accustomed to the armchair than the workbench.

Some people are destined to be deep thinkers. I am not one of those people.

With respect to ingenious subconsciousness, I think, philosophers might well rival poets.

The time for thinkers has come.

Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea They thought great thoughts about liberty Poets wrote down words that did fit Writers wrote books Thinkers thought about it.