Anthony Burgess Quotes

I was very intellectually oriented, very early on.

I'd have liked to have been a bit more intellectual. I'd have liked to have had more brains.

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

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

I want to prove you don't need to have academic syntax to be intelligent.

He whose wisdom cannot help him, gets no good from being wise.

The rare person is still interested in new advances when they are adults. There is possibly a correlation with intelligence. In any case, you have to be fairly bright to keep learning and changing attitudes as you get older.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.

The evidence that I see around me in society indicates that not only is thinking very much out of favor, but I'm not sure that the last couple of generations - Generation X and Generation Next, or whatever you want to call them - even know what a thought is, having been raised to be women.

An intellectual is a man who doesn't know how to park a bike.

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

I would say I have become a lot smarter in the way I understand things.

As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking.

I've never been an intellectual but I have this look.

I don't seem to be able to learn from experience or anything useful. History doesn't help me. Precedents don't inform my experience.

The first complete sentence out of my mouth was probably that line about consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds.

I am probably a pseudo-intellectual.

It's usually only the intellectual ones who understand what's going on in what I do.

Only a well-rounded intellect, a spirit nourished in the eternal sources of intelligence and culture, of justice and wisdom, is a safeguard against both indifference and skepticism.

Large skepticism leads to large understanding. Small skepticism leads to small understanding. No skepticism leads to no understanding.

One of the things that characterizes good intellectual work is a certain self-importance.

Thinking clearly and effectively is the greatest asset of any human being.

The key to wisdom is this - constant and frequent questioning, for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth.