Edward Hoagland Quotes

Intellect is neither practical nor impractical; it is extra-practical.

I thought about how odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people. The only activities I could think of that humans do that have no animal equivalent were smoking, body-building and writing. That's not much, considering how special we seem to think we are.

The genre of science fiction is a fun house, an amusement park ride, but it's also a problem. The question that's always being indirectly asked is this: 'Just who do we think we are and, further, who do we want to be?'

What is it that distinguishes you and me from the lower animals - from the beasts? More, I say, than anything else, human sympathy - human sympathy.

Intellectuals are people who believe that ideas are of more importance than values. That is to say, their own ideas and other people's values.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

I'm still a firm believer that we were definitely put here to use our minds, and that is what makes us different. And that that's the key. If there is anything that is going to stop mankind from being such a beastly, destructive creature, it is reason.

People tend not to use this word beauty because it's not intellectual - but there has to be an overlap between beauty and intellect.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

Throughout its history Islam has been marked by two trends: an intellectual trend that speculated on the philosophical foundations of the world and humanity, and another trend that turned political challenge violent by resort to force.

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.

It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget.

The only thing about a man that is a man is his mind.

Existence loves laughter. You may have observed, or not, that man is the only animal in the whole of existence who is capable of laughing. Laughter is the only distinguishing mark that you are not a buffalo, you are not a donkey; you are a human being. Laughter defines your humanity and your evolution. And the greatest laugh is at your own ridiculous things.

To know, to think, to dream. That is everything.

I've been thinking Hobbes" "On a weekend?" "Well, it wasn't on purpose

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?

Then you have a big problem, because a human is a thinking animal. If you don't think, you're not really a human.

Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

Man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.

We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.

Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect:--for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action.

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.

Allah, the Exalted, gave the angels intellect without desires, He gave the animals desires without intellect, and He gave both to the sons of Adam. So a man whose intellect prevails over his desires is better than the angels, whilst a man whose desire prevails over his intellect is worse than the animals.

If men were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking, they would lose the capacity for asking all the unanswerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.