intellectual weakness Quotes

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Defects and weakness in men's understandings, as well as other faculties, come from want of a right use of their own minds; I am apt to think, the fault is generally mislaid upon nature, and there is often a complaint of want of parts, when the fault lies in want of a due improvement of them.

I am truly horrified by modern man. Such absence of feeling, such narrowness of outlook, such lack of passion and information, such feebleness of thought.

If he were a man of strong mind, it only gave him fits; but a person of mere average intellect it usually sent mad.

It is a great mistake to think that the extremist is a better man than the moderate. Usually the difference is not that he is morally stronger, but that he is intellectually weaker. He is not more virtuous. He is simply more foolish.

Some people pretend they never were in love and never wrote poetry; two weaknesses which they dare not own -- one of the heart, the other of the mind.

There has also been a change - a slippage - in our intellectual and moral strength. Seven lean years of drouth and famine have withered a field of ideas.

Teaching is the last refuge of feeble minds with a classical education.

When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly suprised at the weakness of his intellect.

Hardness of heart is a dreadful quality, but it is doubtful whether in the long run it works more damage than softness of head.

It is a curious paradox that precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity, to those mysterious powers assumed by others; and in those regions of darkness and ignorance where man cannot effect even those things that are within the power of man, there we shall ever find that a blind belief in feats that are far beyond those powers has taken the deepest root in the minds of the deceived, and produced the richest harvest to the knavery of the deceiver.

General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect.

Precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity as to those mysterious powers assumed by others.

Persons of slender intellectual stamina dread competition, as dwarfs are afraid of being run over in the street.