Quotes about Intellect

The alphabetized intellect stakes its claim to the earth by staking it down, extends its dominion by drawing a grid of straight lines and right angles across the body of a continent – across north America, across Africa, across Australia – defining states and provinces, counties and countries with scant regard for the oral peoples that already live there, according to a calculative logic utterly impervious to the life of the land.

If I say that I live in the “United States” or in “Canada,” in “British Colombia” or in “New Mexico,” I situate myself within a purely human set of coordinates. I say little or nothing about the earthly place that I inhabit, but simply establish my temporary location within a shifting matrix of political, economic, and civilizational forces struggling to maintain themselves, today, largely at the expense of the animate earth. The great danger is that I, and many other good persons, may come to believe that our breathing bodies really inhabit these abstractions, and that we will lend our lives more to consolidating, defending, or bewailing the fate of these ephemeral entities than to nurturing and defending the actual places that physically sustain us.

Does the human intellect, or “reason,” really spring us free from our inherence in the depths of this wild proliferation of forms? Or on the contrary, is the human intellect rooted in, and secretly borne by, our forgotten contact with the multiple nonhuman shapes that surround us on every hand?

Every mind has a horizon in respect to its present intellectual capacity but not in respect to its future intellectual capacity.

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.
[Variant translation: We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.]

The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument.

Focus on the moment, not when you are praying with your intellect, but when you are fully experiencing the prayer

"There is a road from the eye to the heart
 that does not go through the intellect."

~G.K. Chesterton~

As regards truth and falsehood, it isn`t truth that has to be invented. > Let`s argue about something intellectual.

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended for us to forego their use."

We should take care not to make intellect our god.  It has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.  It cannot lead, it can only serve.

Spirituality resides in the unconscious mind, or heart.  Rationality resides in the conscious mind, or intellect.  Religion is an attempt to join the two powerful forces and is therefore fraught with peril.

Go, speed the stars of Thought On to their shining goals; -- The sower scatters broad his seed, The wheat thou strew'st be souls. Ralph Waldo Emerson  Source: Intellect-- from Essays: First Series (1841)

Intellect is merely a narrow and highly specific kind of thing that we DO, but our immediacy relates us to what we naturally and essentially ARE, the actualities of our full-dimensional existence.

Nietzsche is absolutely correct, even more correct today than when he wrote it in Thus Spake Zarathustra:  I looked all about me for human beings but all I saw were fragments, deformed creatures with too much eye or too much ear.  This is what the modern culture of specialized intellect--the kind of one-sidedness that banausic utilitarianism alone can value--works so hard to produce. 

The approach of intellect or noesis will forever be an effete and limited sort of thing by contrast with the vigor and color of gnosis; but in academia there is virtually nothing but noetic minds to be found, and the very idea of gnosis is alien and untranslatable, not to mention discreditable.

One can hardly appreciate how academia has perverted its highest tasks and "ideals" without pondering long and hard the implications of Jacques Barzun's House of Intellect and its Hegelian/Bergsonian contrast between rigidified "intellect" and always-growing "intelligence."  This fundamentally Hegelian distinction, needless to say, cuts to the quick of the contrast between Platonic and Aristotelian forms of philosophy.

Perception without the word, which is without thought, is one of the strangest phenomena. Then the perception is much more acute, not only with the brain, but also with all the senses. Such perception is not the fragmentary perception of the intellect nor the affair of the emotions. It can be called a total perception, and it is part of meditation.

Perception without the perceiver in meditation is to commune with the height and depth of the immense. This perception is entirely different from seeing an object without an observer, because in the perception of meditation there is no object and therefore no experience. can, however, take place when the eyes are open and one is surrounded by objects of every kind. But then these objects have no importance at all. One sees them but there is no process of recognition, which means there is no experiencing.

What meaning has such meditation? There is no meaning; there is no utility. But in that meditation there is a movement of great ecstasy which is not to be confounded with pleasure. It is this ecstasy which gives to the eye, to the brain and to the heart, the quality of innocency. Without seeing life as something totally new, it is a routine, a boredom, a meaningless affair. So meditation is of the greatest importance. It opens the door to the incalculable, to the measureless.

SETH said:  Now when you understand that intellectually, then the intellect can take for granted that its own information is not all the information you possess.  It can realize that its own knowledge  represents the tip of the iceberg.  As you apply that realization to your life you begin to realize furthermore that in practical terms you are indeed supported by a greater body of knowledge than you consciously realize, and by the magical, spontaneous fountain of action that forms your existence.  The intellect can then realize that it does not have to go it all alone.  Everything does not have to be reasoned out, even to be understood.

SETH said:  When the intellect is used properly, it thinks of a goal and automatically sets the body in motion toward it, and automatically arouses the other levels of communication unknown to it, so that all forces work together toward the achievement.

Some people seek meaning in life through personal gain, through personal relationship, or through personal experiences. However, it seems to me that being blessed with the intellect to divine the ultimate secrets of nature gives meaning enough to life.

"What is the Unpardonable Sin?" asked the lime-burner; and then he shrank farther from his companion, trembling lest his question should be answered.

"It is a sin that grew within my own breast," replied Ethan Brand, standing erect, with a pride that distinguishes all enthusiasts of his stamp.  "A sin that grew nowhere else!  The sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims!"

Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these.