George Woodcock Quotes

Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so damn serious.

I like information. I love when smart people make me think of something in a new way.

I only surround myself with people who are intellectually stimulating.

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.

Scientists and academics in particular focus on detail and the minutiae. When they talk to each other, they usually don't focus on the broad ideas; they don't focus on social interconnectedness. They focus on the task that they're doing.

It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.

Man's mind is not a container to be filled but rather a fire to be kindled.

The world is too complicated to have scientists only talking to scientists.

I don't want your vote. I want something more important. I want your commitment to think. Because once you start thinking, I'll get your vote.

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

Everyone has something to learn from one another. When different disciplines meet, it creates this amazing unpredictability.

I just love to read, learn, and think through complex things.

I like my mind being stimulated. I like discovering new concepts.

The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.

I try to educate myself as much as possible, as I do with the director and the designers and everyone I used to work with. It just helps, I think, with the frame of reference for who you're working with.

What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement.

Many young painters would never have taken their pencils in hand if they could have felt, known, and understood, early enough, what really produced a master like Raphael.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

Many adults, whether consciously or unconsciously, find it beneath their adult dignity to do anything as childish as read a book, think a thought, or get an idea. Adults are rarely embarrased at having forgotten what little algebra or geography they once learned

Neither drink [coffee or tea] was known in Frankish lands, but seated in the coffeehouses, I drank of each at various times, twirling my moustache and listening with attention to that headier draught, the wine of the intellect, that sweet and bitter juice distilled from the vine of thought and the tree of man's experience.

A book full of brilliance imparts some of it even to its opponents.

The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

As for borrowing Mr. Whistler's ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself.

I love hearing details of writers' craft, as cannibals eat the brains of clever men to get cleverer.

Picasso could use everyone's paintings and transform them into his own. He was using ideas from all of his contemporaries.