Monique Wittig Quotes

Man is an intellectual animal, and therefore an everlasting contradiction to himself. His senses centre in himself, his ideas reach to the ends of the universe; so that he is torn in pieces between the two, without a possibility of its ever being otherwise.

Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers.

Much as I loved doing 'The Big Breakfast,' it almost became automatic. I need something to keep my brain ticking over, something that I have to concentrate on.

My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.

I don't consider myself an intellectual. And this is not one of my aims. But I admire intellectual people.

The intellectual, the man of thought, doubt and analysis, should give the best of himself.

The proper method for hastening the decay of error is by teaching every man to think for himself.

It is like a voyage of discovery into unknown lands, seeking not for new territory but for new knowledge. It should appeal to those with a good sense of adventure.

A thought often makes us hotter than a fire.

It's fine to work on any problem, so long as it generates interesting mathematics along the way - even if you don't solve it at the end of the day.

The grinding of the intellect is for most people as painful as a dentist's drill.

I'm a walking contradiction.

HALE, with a tasty love of intellectual pursuit

He was so excited by this little bit of intelligence that he might have gone off, perplexed, pondering for a long time. It was like reading a wonderful sentence in a book, and not being able to continue because so many possibilities were crowding his mind.

The mind at war with itself does war with any other mind, and that produces war in the world - all of it.

We are by far the most contradictory of all primates. An animal with this much internal conflict has never lived on this earth.

Knowledge we have. Anyone who strives for it with particular intensity is suspect of striving against it.

Thinking is not always...comforting. It is always good, but not always comforting. Royal Assassin

Read less, study less, but think more

In the last two months I have been very busy with my own mathematical speculations, which have cost me much time, without my having reached my original goal. Again and again I was enticed by the frequently interesting prospects from one direction to the other, sometimes even by will-o'-the-wisps, as is not rare in mathematic speculations.

Two things, almost incompatible, are united in me in a manner which I am unable to understand: a very ardent temperament, lively and tumultuous passions, and, at the same time, slowly developed and confused ideas, which never present themselves until it is too late. One might say that my heart and my mind do not belong to the same person.

Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.

Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.

Active minds that think and study, like swift brooks are seldom muddy.

There are some who live by every rule and cling tightly to their rectitude because they fear being swept away by a tempest of passion, and there are others who cling to the rules because they fear that there is no passion there at all, and that if they let go they would simply remain where they are, foolish and unmoved; and they could bear that least of all. Living a life of iron control lets them pretend to themselves that only by the mightiest effort of will can they hold great passions at bay.