"'I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.'

'A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.'"
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth."
— Anne Sexton

"It takes a heap of sense to write good nonsense."
— Mark Twain

"For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them."
— John Milton (Areopagitica)

"We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.

We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one's happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"The acquisition of knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it may thus drive out useless things and retain the good. For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known."
— Leonardo da Vinci

"Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values--that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others--that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human--that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay--that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live--that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road--that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up--that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"...and the vessel was not full, his intellect was not satisfied, his soul was not at peace, his heart was not still."
— Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)

"Pull the thorn of existence out of the heart! Fast!
For when you do, you will see thousands of rose gardens in yourself."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything."
— Aldous Huxley (The Genius and the Goddess)

"Is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks."
— Herman Melville

"This was a townscape raised in the teeth of cold winds from the east; a city of winding cobbled streets and haughty pillars; a city of dark nights and candlelight, and intellect."
— Alexander McCall Smith (The Sunday Philosophy Club)

"Love isn't the work of the tender and the gentle;
Love is the work of wrestlers.
The one who becomes a servant of lovers
is really a fortunate sovereign.
Don't ask anyone about Love; ask Love about Love.
Love is a cloud that scatters pearls."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Love isn't the work of the tender and the gentle;
Love is the work of wrestlers.
The one who becomes a servant of lovers
is really a fortunate sovereign.
Don't ask anyone about Love; as Love about Love.
Love is a cloud that scatters pearls."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi