W quotes

View Quote The eulogies of my intelligence are positively intended to evade the question “Is what she says true?”

View Quote Simone Weil, Letter to her parents, 1943

View Quote Just as a vagrant accused of stealing a carrot from a field stands before a comfortably seated judge who keeps up an elegant flow of queries, comments and witticisms while the accused is unable to stammer a word, so truth stands before an intelligence which is concerned with the elegant manipulation of opinions.

View Quote Simone Weil, Human Personality (1943), p. 68

View Quote There is nothing that comes closer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to feel pride in one’s intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it.

View Quote Simone Weil, Simone Weil: An Anthology (1986), p. 35

View Quote The intelligence is defeated as soon as the expression of one's thoughts is preceded, explicitly or implicitly, by the little word 'we'. And when the light of the intelligence grows dim, it is not very long before the love of good becomes lost.

View Quote Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (1949), p. 26

View Quote I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes—to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed. It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.

View Quote H.G. Wells The Time Machine Chapter 10

View Quote To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.

View Quote Cornel West, "Chekhov, Coltrane, and Democracy: Interview by David Lionel Smith." The Cornel West Reader (1998).

View Quote Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

View Quote Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues (1954) 15 December 1939.

View Quote I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.

View Quote Woodrow Wilson, Speech to the National Press Club (20 March 1914).