S quotes

View Quote Men of limited intelligence are so exposed to boredom and this is due to their intellect’s being absolutely nothing but the medium of motives for their will. Now if at the moment there are no motives to be taken up, the will rests and the intellect takes a holiday since the one, like the other, does not become active of its own accord. The result is a terrible stagnation of all the powers of the entire man, in a word boredom. To ward off this, men now present the will with trivial motives that are merely temporary and are taken at random in order to rouse it and thus bring into action the intellect that has to interpret them.

View Quote Arthur Schopenhauer, “Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life,” Parerga und Paralipomena, E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 331.

View Quote So-called good society recognizes every kind of claim but that of intellect, which is a contraband article; and people are expected to exhibit an unlimited amount of patience towards every form of folly and stupidity, perversity and dullness; while personal merit has to beg pardon, as it were, for being present, or else conceal itself altogether. Intellectual superiority offends by its very existence, without any desire to do so.

View Quote Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims, T. B. Saunders, trans., § 9

View Quote We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.

View Quote Susan Sontag, "Women, the Arts, & the Politics of Culture: An Interview with Susan Sontag" in Salmagundi, No. 31-32 (Fall/Winter 1975), p. 29; later published in Conversations with Susan Sontag (1995) edited by Leland A. Poague, p. 77.

View Quote Strength cannot keep pace with intelligence.

View Quote Sumerian proverb from Urim, Text online at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, 3rd millennium BCE.

View Quote A man's intelligence comes from god.

View Quote Sumerian proverb from Urim, Text online at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, 3rd millennium BCE.