Ross Douthat Quotes

The public schools I attended were dominated by athletics and rarely inspiring intellectually, but I enjoyed a small circle of interesting friends despite my ineptitude at team sports and my preference for reading.

Nature first, then theory. Or, better, Nature and theory closely intertwined while you throw all your intellectual capital at the subject. Love the organisms for themselves first, then strain for general explanations, and, with good fortune, discoveries will follow. If they don't, the love and the pleasure will have been enough.

As a child I wanted to be a grown-up. I wanted to know everything - not that I like to talk about it. I hate intellectual conversation with intellectuals because I only care about my opinion.

Original thinking migrates each day in search of nourishment.

When a new project comes along, I want to know that the experience is going to be challenging and exciting. Part of me is going to be drawn to doing something new and also the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity.

Am I an intellectual? I don't think so. Less than people sometimes think, I have to say. But more than some others think.

The term "intellectual" is used conventionally to refer to people who happen to have unusual opportunities in this regard, and as always, opportunity confers moral responsibility.

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.

The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.

I would call an intellectual one whose instrument of work - his mind - is also his major source of pleasure; a man whose entertainment is his intelligence.

Anybody who wants to learn everything is pretty stupid. You learn what you can.

This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.

The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity.

One of the benefits of a bad education is the constant pleasure of discovery.

Men that love wisdom must be acquainted with very many things indeed.

Doubt is the first step towards knowledge, not faith.

Man's greatest asset is the unsettled mind.

There is no knowledge and science like pondering and thought; and there is no prosperity and advancement like knowledge and science.

No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest- for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.

A man's pursuit of knowledge is greater than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.

The library is the biggest cracker box factory in the world. The more you eat, the more you want.

The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.

The more I study, the more insatiable do I feel my genius for it to be.

To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be.