Quotations – Page 2

Charles Baudelaire

Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.

Author: Charles Baudelaire | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge

Albert Einstein

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Author: Albert Einstein | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge

Arthur C. Brooks

Illusion of explanatory depth … is similar to the famous Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people with low levels of skill in an activity tend to overrate their competence. One explanation for this is “hypocognition,” that people don’t know what they don’t know.
[…]
The overconfidence of people laboring under the illusion of explanatory depth can lead to the spread of misinformation. As researchers have shown, … [ Read more ]

James Fallows

This to me is the most consistent marker of real intelligence. The more acute someone’s ability to perceive and assess, the more likely that person is to recognize his or her limits. These include the unevenness of any one person’s talents; the specific areas of weakness—social awkwardness, musical tin ear, being stronger with numbers than with words, or vice versa; and the incomparable vastness of … [ Read more ]

Author: James Fallows | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge

John Macmurray

When it is the persistent and universal tendency in any society to concentrate upon the intellect and its training, the result will be a society which amasses power, and with power the means to the good life, but which has no correspondingly developed capacity for living the good life for which it has amassed the means… We have immense power, and immense resources; we worship … [ Read more ]

Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Power, Sociology | Anthropology

John Macmurray

The emotional life is not simply a part or an aspect of human life. It is not, as we so often think, subordinate, or subsidiary to the mind. It is the core and essence of human life. The intellect arises out of it, is rooted in it, draws its nourishment and sustenance from it, and is the subordinate partner in the human economy. This is … [ Read more ]

John Macmurray

Intellectual knowledge tells us about the world. it gives us knowledge about things, not knowledge of them. It does not reveal the world as it is. Only emotional knowledge can do that.

John Macmurray

The strength of our opposition to the development of reason is measured by the strength of our dislike of being disillusioned. We should all admit, if it were put to us directly, that it is good to get rid of illusions, but in practice the process of disillusionment is painful and disheartening. We all confess to the desire to get at the truth, but in … [ Read more ]

John Macmurray

The main difficulty that faces us in the development of a scientific knowledge of the world lies not in the outside world but in our own emotional life. It is the desire to retain beliefs to which we are emotionally attached for some reason or other. It is the tendency to make the wish father to the thought. .. If we are to be scientific … [ Read more ]

Bertrand Russell

If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do… The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there … [ Read more ]

Henry David Thoreau

A man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally… We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.

Author: Henry David Thoreau | Source: The Art of Manliness | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement

José Ortega y Gasset

I consider it a grave misfortune if, in any period or nation, intelligence remains, practically speaking, reduced to the limits of the intellectual. Intelligence asserts itself above all not in art, nor in science, but in intuition of life. The intellectual, however, barely lives; they are usually a person with poverty of intuition; their acts in the world are few and they have very little … [ Read more ]

Author: José Ortega y Gasset | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge

José Ortega y Gasset

It is undeniable that a large part of science and literature has been produced in a somnambulistic trance; that is to say, by creatures who are not at all intelligent… Science and literature, as such, do not imply perspicacity; but, undoubtedly, their cultivation is a stimulant which favors the awakening of the mind and preserves it in that luminous state of alertness which constitutes intelligence. … [ Read more ]

Author: José Ortega y Gasset | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Math & Science

Shane Parrish

Describing something with accuracy forces you to learn more about it. Accurate description requires the following:
Observation
Curiosity about what you are witnessing
Suspending assumptions about cause and effect
It can be difficult to stick with describing something completely and accurately. It’s hard to overcome the tendency to draw conclusions based on partial information or to leave assumptions unexplored.

Stanley Fish

“Intelligence”, like “merit,” is not a natural but a constructed measure, the content of which will vary with the various goals one has decided to embrace.

Author: Stanley Fish | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge

Howard Bloom

It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.

Author: Howard Bloom | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

Aldous Huxley

Knowledge is acquired when we succeed in fitting a new experience into the system of concepts based upon our old experiences. Understanding comes when we liberate ourselves from the old and so make possible a direct, unmediated contact with the new, the mystery, moment by moment, of our existence.

Author: Aldous Huxley | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement

Maria Popova

Because the units of knowledge are concepts, and concepts can be conveyed and transmitted in words and symbols, knowledge itself can be passed between persons. Understanding, on the other hand, is intimate and subjective, not a conceptual container but an aura of immediacy cast upon an experience — which means it cannot be transmitted and transacted like knowledge.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge

Maria Popova

To understand anything — another person’s experience of reality, another fundamental law of physics — is to restructure our existing knowledge, shifting and broadening our prior frames of reference to accommodate a new awareness. And yet we have a habit of confusing our knowledge — which is always limited and incomplete: a model of the cathedral of reality, built from primary-colored blocks of fact — … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement