It is always the task of the intellectual to "think otherwise." This is not just a perverse idiosyncrasy. It is an absolutely essential feature of a society.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life-the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it-can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics or in trade, gains largely in our esteem if we discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill.

Intellectualism, though by no means confined to doubters, is often the sole piety of the skeptic.

The intellectual is engage-he is pledged, committed, enlisted. What everyone else is willing to admit, namely that ideas and abstractions are of signal importance in human life, he imperatively feels.

The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. God-like, he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis, completely expressible in words.

On the heights it is warmer than people in the valley suppose, especially in winter. The thinker recognizes the full import of this simile.

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away.