John Green Quotes

I want to show people it's not elitist to be a deep thinker.

I'm an intellectual.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

I think if I hadn't become a sociologist, I would have become very anti-intellectual.

Some people drink from the fountain of knowledge, others just gargle.

A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.

To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.

The intellectual ... may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesque. Although there have been zealots whom we may still regard as intellectuals, zealotry is a defect of the breed and not of the essence.

When you think about being contrarian, you have to think about - how is it that smart people will disagree with me, disagree with me ...from a position of intelligence, and there is something that I know that they don't know, that will actually in fact play out to be true.

I have never been able to understand anyone on this planet who lacks a need for knowledge. Is it not God's greatest gift to us all, this capacity to think, to wonder, to imagine?

I hate books; they only teach people to talk about what they don't understand.

Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.

When smart people are nice, it's always terrifying, because I know they're taking in everything and thinking all kinds of smart and potentially judgmental things.

I like my job because it involves learning. I like being around smart people who are trying to figure out new things. I like the fact that if people really try they can figure out how to invent things that actually have an impact.

The world's greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for that a professional chair offers no special opportunities.

An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people-it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the burden of the mystery.

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man.

I don't think people are averse to thinking about things in a deep way, but we have limited time and opportunity to think about things in a deep way. I think that's why there is an appetite for non-fiction - it gives people the opportunity to reexamine ordinary experience and be smarter about it.

Men who think deeply appear to be comedians in their dealings with others because they always have to feign superficiality in order to be understood.

Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.

The main aim of education should be to send children out into the world with a reasonably sized anthology in their heads so that, while seated on the lavatory, waiting in doctors' surgeries, on stationary trains or watching interviews with politicians, they may have something interesting to think about.

I realized that, to a large degree, I had kept my rational mind at bay my whole life. I just acted on intuition in terms of how I related to life. At some point, my rational mind started creeping in, and it would not shut up. I finally had to address it and confront it. I think most intelligent people, at a younger age than I have, begin to question some of the fundamental assumptions our society promotes. But me, I just rejected it without even considering it.

The minute we begin to think we have all the answers, we forget the questions.

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.

I think a lot of things can be misconstrued in a lot of ways. And I think if people open their minds more, and they try to look deeper into something than just something that is a very big, hot, fiery button to hide behind...I think if people looked into something bigger that I was trying to speak upon, they wouldn't be so easy to fire back silly, miscellaneous things.