intellectual refinement Quotes

[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.

Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

Today, with the abundance of books available, it is the mark of a truly educated man to know what not to read. … Feed only on the best. As John Wesley’s mother counseled him: ‘Avoid whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, takes off your relish for spiritual things, … increases the authority of the body over the mind.

The more cultured a man, the less fortunate he is.

It takes intelligence and training, self-discipline and fine-sensibility, to gain renewed life through leisure occupation. America now suffers spiritual poverty, and art must become more fully American life before her leisure can become culture.

Education gives sobriety to the young, comfort to the old, riches to the poor and is an ornament to the rich.

He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it

To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.

In the productions of the mind, as in those of the soil, the gifts of nature are excelled by industry and skill . . .

The only true aristocracy is that of consciousness.

Many men absorbed in business show such a rare quality of culture that we are surprised at it. The reason invariably is partly because hard work and even the weariness it leaves carry a nobility with them, but also because there is no room in such lives for inferior mental occupation.

Emerson is a person who lives instinctively on ambrosia - and leaves everything indigestible on his plate.

The finest minds, like the finest metals, dissolve the easiest.

It is the mark of a truly educated man to know what not to read.

Man's duty is to improve himself; to cultivate his mind; and, when he finds himself going astray, to bring the moral law to bear upon himself.

Educated people do indeed speak the same languages; cultivated ones need not speak at all.

Tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities will always be the favorite beverage of the intellectual.

Men are admitted into heaven not because they have curbed or governed their passions, but because they have cultivate their understandings.

Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.

Knowledge, a rude unprofitable mass, the mere materials with which wisdom builds, till smoothed and squared and fitted to its place, does but encumber whom it seems to enrich. Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much; wisdom is humble that he knows no more.

Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world

It was only the vulgarly mediocre that repelled her.

The finest wits have their sediment.

A high degree of intellectual refinement in the female is the surest pledge society can have for the improvement of the male.

Erudition, like a bloodhound, is a charming thing when held firmly in leash, but it is not so attractive when turned loose upon a defenseless and unerudite public.