Intellectual Journey Quotes

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.

Books are but stepping stones to show you where other minds have been.

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.

Man is wise only while in search of wisdom; when he imagines he has attained it, he is a fool.

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.

I want the reader to join me on an intellectual and emotional journey into some major aspect of existence.

The first book I ever really read was Plato's 'Republic,' and then I had to go over that five times or something.

By the time I had got to college, I had begun to read and had decided that most of what Christians believed could not be credible. So I became a philosophy major at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.

It is like a voyage of discovery into unknown lands, seeking not for new territory but for new knowledge. It should appeal to those with a good sense of adventure.

I didn't even have a clear idea of why I wanted to go to Oxford - apart from the fact I had fallen in love with the architecture. It certainly wasn't out of some great sense of academic or intellectual achievement. In many ways, my education only began after I'd left university.

I know not how I seem to others, but to myself I am but a small child wandering upon the vast shores of knowledge, every now and then finding a small bright pebble to content myself with while the vast ocean of undiscovered truth lay before me.

Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it's not the destination, it's the journeyto get there. It's a way of thinking and it's an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it. I think once we stop asking questions like "what is the age of the universe," or "how are the instructions of DNA carried out on a microscopic level," once we stop asking questions like that, we're dead.

The person doing the learning is the person writing the book as much as the person reading it.

When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.

A bookcase is as good as a view, as much of a panorama as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms and zephyrs.

Books are the windows through which the soul looks out.

An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind. It tracks the evolution of a single consciousness in order to give us an experience - an experience of looking for something and then finding ourselves in a different place by the time we've finished our journey.

The only true voyage of discovery, . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.

The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.

My definition of modernism took a while to develop.

I am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an easy matter.

I read a lot of G.K. Chesterton. It was a fairly conventional intellectual path to the Catholic church, I would say.

I am an example of a person who got zeroed into a philosophy early.

At Harvard College, I discovered political philosophy as a way of life.

And when you take something like the changing colour of autumn leaves and start to ask why, you're starting off on an intellectual journey which will take you beyond that moment of visual satisfaction, while robbing nothing from that experience.