Intellectual Hunger Quotes

To understand a profound thought is to have, at the moment one understands it, a profound thought oneself; and this demands some effort, a genuine descent to the heart of oneself . . . Only desire and love give us the strength to make this effort. The only books that we truly absorb are those we read with real appetite, after having worked hard to get them, so great had been our need of them.

Wit, like the Belly, if it be not fed, Will starve the Members, and distract the Head.

I get newspapers from Britain and other countries twice a week and read them almost page to page. Sometimes I find I'm reading things I don't even need to read, because my mind is still hungry.

Hunger is the handmaid of genius.

To be bound by hungers is a beautiful thing but to be bound by physical hungers only is too low a state for man.

I have read my books by many lights, hoarding their beauty, their wit or wisdom against the dark days when I would have no book, nor a place to read. I have known hunger of the belly kind many times over, but I have known a worse hunger: the need to know and to learn.

Being away from home gave me the chance to look at myself with a jaundiced eye. I learned not to be ashamed of a real hunger for knowledge, something I had always tried to hide, and I came home glad to start in here again with a love for Europe that I am afraid will never leave me.

Never write on a subject without first having read yourself full on it; and never read on a subject till you have thought yourself hungry on it.

The most important thing about education is appetite.

If you are hungry for food, you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

Curiosity is the lust of the mind.

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. They are a hundred times better educated than their grandparents, and ten times more sophisticated. There has never been such an open-minded group. The problem is that no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.

Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger for books was constant.

Women need a space that quenches their intellectual hunger, engages and empowers them with relatable content.

I'm fat because I'm greedy, and if my mind is fat it's because I'm curious.