Literary notes about Intellect (AI summary)
In literature, "intellect" is portrayed as a multifaceted force—sometimes an inspiring source that elevates understanding and guides moral action, and at other times a constrained or even flawed faculty. Writers evoke it as both the spark that ignites insight and the instrument that, when misdirected, stifles perception or leads to error ([1], [2], [3]). At times, it embodies the refined capacity for discerning truth and aesthetic beauty ([4]), while in other instances it is critiqued as an element of vanity or rigidity in thought ([5], [6]). In this broad spectrum, intellect consistently emerges as a vital concept that both defines and challenges the human condition ([7], [8]).
- Natural, beneficent, sacred, as in a sense they may be, they somehow oppress the intellect and, like a brooding mother, half stifle what they feed.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana - His intellect was of that order to which the acquisition of knowledge is less a labor than an intuition and a necessity.
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2 by Edgar Allan Poe - It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect,What is truth?
— from Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson - No; he was a man of a most subtle and refined intellect.
— from An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde - Result: mediocrity acquires intellect, wit, and genius, it becomes entertaining, and even seductive.
— from The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book III and IV by Nietzsche - “Then, as he is criminal he is selfish; and as his intellect is small and his action is based on selfishness, he confines himself to one purpose.
— from Dracula by Bram Stoker - Aristocracies are of three kinds: (1) of birth and rank; (2) of wealth; and (3) of intellect.
— from The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Counsels and Maxims by Arthur Schopenhauer - On the contrary, the truth and formal essence of things is as it is, because it exists by representation as such in the intellect of God.
— from Ethics by Benedictus de Spinoza
