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  • Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!†whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age† Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

    - Matthew Arnold
      Of Oxford. Essays in Criticism First Series, preface.

  •    To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, Is a keen observer of life, The word 'Intellectual'suggests straight away A man who's untrue to his wife.

    -W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden
      NewYear Letter (published1941), note to l.1277.

  • Tearsmay be intellectual, but theycan never be political. They save no man from being shot, no child from being thrown alive into the furnace.

    - Saul Bellow
      The Dean's December, ch.12.

  • This is the editorial age, and the most intellectual of all ages.

    -James Gordon, Snr Bennett
      In the Courier and Enquirer,12 Nov.

  • Ink, n. Avillainous compound†chiefly used to facilitate the infection of idiocyand promote intellectual crime.

    - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
      The Cynic's Word Book. Retitled  The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

  • The intellectual†is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.

    - Louise Bogan
      'Some Notes on Popular and Unpopular Poetry'.

  • ButOh! ye lords of ladies intellectual, Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all?.

    -Rochdale
    ^24  Don Juan, canto1, stanza 22.

  • Intellectuel = celui qui se de  double. Intellectual: someone whose mind watches itself.

    - Albert Camus
    Carnets,1935^42 (published1962).

  • A romantic interest in our own sex, not necessarily carried as far as physical experiments, was the intellectual fashion.

    - Cyril Vernon Connolly
    Of Oxfordduring his student days. Quotedin Peter Quennell The Marble Foot (1977).

  • The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man's attaining to a higher eminence in whatever he takes up, than can womanwhether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands.

    - Charles Robert Darwin
    The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, ch.19.

  • There is much of economic theory which is pursued for no better reason than its intellectual attraction; it is a good game. 402

    - SirJohn Richard Hicks
      Causality in Economics.

  • Theyare the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.

    - Oliver Wendell Holmes
    ^8  Of facts. The Autocrat of the Breakfast  Table, ch.1.

  • Man doth seek a triple perfection: first a sensual, consisting in those things which very life itself requireth either as necessary supplements, or as beauties and ornaments thereof; then an intellectual, consisting in those things which none underneath man is either capable of or acquainted with; lastly a spiritual and divine, consisting in those things whereunto we tend by supernatural means here, but cannot here attain unto them.

    - Richard Hooker
      Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

  • With each generation the entire race passes through the body of its womanhood as through a mould, reappearing withtheindeliblemarks ofthat mould upon it, that as the os cervix of woman, through which the head of the human infant passes at birth, forms a ring, determining for ever the size at birth of the human head†so exactly the intellectual capacity, the physical vigour, the emotional depth of woman, forms also an untranscendable circle, circumscribing with each successive generation the limits of expansion of the human race. 720

    -Iron
    Women and Labour, ch.3.

  • I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups† Literary intellectuals at one poleat the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.

    - C(harles) P(ercy), 1st Baron Snow
      TheTwo Cultures, Rede Lecture.

  • Ex tertio cognitionis genere oritur necessarioAmor Dei intellectualis. From the third kind of knowledge [intuition] arises necessarily the intellectual love of God.

    - Baruch also known as Benedict de Spinoza Spinoza
      Ethics, bk.5, prop.32, corollary.

  • There is a North-west passage to the intellectual World.

    - Laurence Sterne
    ^67  Tristram Shandy, bk.5, ch.42.

  • Why, as civilization spreads, do outstanding men become fewer? Why, when attainments are the lot of all, do great intellectual talents become rarer? Why, when there are no longer lower classes, are there no longer upper classes? Why, when knowledge of how to rule reaches the masses, is there a lackof great abilities in the direction of society? America clearly poses these questions.But who can answer them?

    - Alexis Charles Henri Cle  rel de Tocqueville
      Translated by George Lawrence. Quoted in J P Mayer (ed) Journey toAmerica (1960).

  • Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life-blood of real civilisation.

    - George Macaulay Trevelyan
      English Social History.

  • Hissensuality has all drifted intosexual vanity, delight for being the candletothemoths, with a dash of intellectual curiosity to give flavour to his tickled vanity† His incompleteness as a thinker, his shallow and vulgar view of many human relationshipsthe lack of a sterner kind of humour which would show him the dreariness of his farce and the total absence of proportion and inadequateness in some of his ideasall these defects came largely from the flippant and worthless self- complacency brought about by the worship of rather second-rate women.

    - (Martha) Beatrice ne  e Potter Webb
      Of George Bernard Shaw. Diary entry, 8 May.

  • The woman voter would be pernicious to the State not only because she could not back her vote by physical force, but also by reason of her intellectual defects.

    - SirAlmroth Edward Wright
      The Unexpurgated Case againstWoman Suffrage, pt.2.

  • Practically every man feels that there is in woman†an element of unreason which, when you come upon it, summarily puts an end to purely intellectual intercourse.

    - SirAlmroth Edward Wright
      The Unexpurgated Case againstWoman Suffrage, pt.5.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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