The Intellectual Life Quotes

“Friendship is an obstetric art; it draws out our richest and deepest resources; it unfolds the wings of our dreams and hidden indeterminate thoughts; it serves as a check on our judgements, tries out our new ideas, keeps up our ardor, and inflames our enthusiasm.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“It is a painful thing to say to oneself: by choosing one road I am turning my back on a thousand others. Everything is interesting; everything might be useful; everything attracts and charms a noble mind; but death is before us; mind and matter make their demands; willy-nilly we must submit and rest content as to things that time and wisdom deny us, with a glance of sympathy which is another act of our homage to the truth.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“The reward of a work is to have produced it; the reward of effort is to have grown by it.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“We must beware of yielding to the pressure of a spirit of cowardly conformity which proclaims itself everybody's friend in the hope that everybody will obligingly return the compliment.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“When silence takes possession of you; when far from the racket of the human highway the sacred fire flames up in the stillness; when peace, which is the tranquillity of order, puts order in your thoughts, feelings, and investigations, you are in the supreme disposition for learning; you can bring your materials together; you can create; you are definitely at your working point; it is not the moment to dwell on wretched trifles, to half live while time runs by, and to sell heaven for nothings.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“Truth serves only its slaves.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“The man who is too isolated grows timid, abstracted, a little odd: He stumbles along amid realities like a sailor who has just come off his ship; he has lost the sense of the human lot; he seems to look on you as if you were a "proposition" to be inserted in a syllogism, or an example to be put down in a notebook.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“Genius simplifies things”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“Do you want to have a humble share in perpetuating wisdom among men, in gathering up the inheritance of the ages, in formulating the rules of the mind for the present time, in discovering facts and causes, in turning men's wandering eyes towards first causes and their hearts towards supreme ends, in reviving if necessary some dying flame, in organizing the propaganda of truth and goodness? That is the lot reserved for you. It is surely worth a little extra sacrifice; it is worth steadily pursuing with jealous passion.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“When we want to awaken a thought in anyone, what are the means at our disposal? One only, to produce in him by word and sign states of sensibility and of imagination, emotion and memory in which he will discover our idea and make it his own.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“Inspiration is incompatible with selfish desire. Whoever wants something for himself sets truth aside. Such aims can only degrade work.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“Reason ambitions only a world; faith gives it infinity.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“Keep your soul free. What matters most in life is not knowledge, but character … There is a knowledge other than that which is of the domain of memory: the knowledge of how to live. Study must be an act of life, must serve life, must feel itself impregnated with life. Of the two kinds of men, those who endeavor to know something, and those who try to be someone, the palm is to the second. What we know is like a beginning, a rough sketch only; the man is the finished work.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“Details are nothing: facts are nothing: the important things are the dependences, the transmissions of influence, the connecting links, the exchanges, which constitute the life of nature. Now, behind all these dependences, is the primal dependence; at the spot to which all connections converge is the supreme Bond; at the highest point of all transmissions, the Spring; beneath the exchanges the Gift; beneath the systole and diastole of the world, the Heart, the boundless Heart of Being. Must not the mind refer back to it unceasingly, and never for a minute lose touch with what is thus the All of all things, and consequently of all knowledge?”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“So acquire the habit of being present at this activity of the material and moral universe. Learn to look; compare what is before you with your familiar or secret ideas. Do not see in a town merely houses, but human life and history. Let a gallery or a museum show you something more than a collection of objects, let it show you schools of art and of life, conceptions of destiny and of nature, successive or varied tendencies of technique, of inspiration, of feeling. Let a workshop speak to you not only of iron and wood, but of man's estate, of work, of ancient and modern social economy, of class relationships. Let travel tell you of mankind; let scenery remind you of the great laws of the world; let the stars speak to you of measureless duration; let the pebbles on your path be to you the residue of the formation of the earth; let the sight of a family make you think of past generations; and let the least contact with your fellows throw light on the highest conception of man. If you cannot look thus, you will become, or be, a man of only commonplace mind. A thinker is like a filter, in which truths as they pass through leave their best substance behind.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE, Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods - Sertillanges

“Study has been called a prayer to truth.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE, Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods - Sertillanges

“your cowardice today is a poor guarantee for your heroism tomorrow”
― Sertillanges Antonin Gilbert -, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“This universal, which is at one and the same time the true and the good, cannot be honored as the true—we cannot enter into intimate union with it, discover its traces, and yield ourselves to its mighty sway—unless we recognize it and serve it equally as the good.”
― A. G. Sertillanges O.P., The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“What wisdom and what virtue there is in judging oneself truly and in remaining oneself! You have a part that only you can play; and your business is to play it to perfection, instead of trying to force fortune. Our lives are not interchangeable. Equally by aiming too high and by falling too low, one misses the path to the goal. Go straight ahead, in your own way, with God for guide.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“Every work is great when it is in exact measure. A work that exceeds its proper limits is the least of all. We have said repeatedly that your work, your proper work, is unique; another man's work is equally so, do not interchange with him. You alone can do well what is laid upon you; you would do badly what your neighbor will do well. God is satisfied in all.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“> With a rapid and often unconscious impulse, we pass from the trace or the image to God, and then, coming back with new vigor and strength, we retrace the footsteps of the divine Walker. We now find things have a deeper meaning, are magnified; we see in them an episode of an immense spiritual happening. Even while we busy ourselves with some trifling thing, we feel ourselves dependent on truth in comparison with which the mountains are ephemeral; infinite Being and infinite duration enfold us and our study is in very truth, " a study of eternity".”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“The good is the brother of the true; it will help its brother.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“The sciences and philosophy without theology discrown themselves more lamentably, since the crown they repudiate is a heavenly one; and they go more irremediably astray, for earth without heaven cannot find the path of its orbit, nor the influences that give it fruitfulness.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE, Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods - Sertillanges

“In everything go straight to what is essential; do not linger over trifling points: it is not in small points that sciences are interconnected. It is often by detail, but by characteristic detail you get back again to the substance.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE, Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods - Sertillanges

“In this quiet spirit, you relax completely, more than if you thought anxiously of a morrow without help, more above all than by living over again at night, as so often happens, the worries of the day-worries exaggerated by semi-unconsciousness, which poison the night and will be there again in the morning to serve you up their bitter draught.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE, Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods - Sertillanges

“entrust to God and to your own soul — the question that is preoccupying you, the idea that is slow in developing its virtuality’s, or that eludes your grasp.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE, Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods - Sertillanges

“Friendship is an obstetric art; it draws out our richest and deepest resources; it unfolds the wings of our dreams and hidden indeterminate thoughts; it serves as a check on our judgments, tries out our new ideas, keeps up our ardor, and inflames our enthusiasm.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE, Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods - Sertillanges

“For do not forget that in association with others, even in ordinary everyday meetings, there is something to he gleaned.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE, Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods - Sertillanges

“Truth is commoner than articles of furniture. It cries out in the streets and does not turn its back on us when we turn our backs on it. Ideas emerge from facts; they also emerge from conversations, chance occurrences, theatres, visits, strolls, the most ordinary books. Everything holds treasures, because everything is in everything, and a few laws of life and of nature govern all the rest.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE, Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods - Sertillanges

“Every light striking on an object may lead up to the sun; every road opened is a corridor to God.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE, Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods - Sertillanges