Intellectual Conversation Quotes

nothing is so pleasant ... as to display your worldly wisdom in epigram and dissertation, but it is a trifle tedious to hear another person display theirs.

While you're playing cards with a regular guy or having a bite to eat with him, he seems a peaceable, good-humoured and not entirely dense person. But just begin a conversation with him about something inedible, politics or science, for instance, and he ends up in a deadend or starts in on such an obtuse and base philosophy that you can only wave your hand and leave.

I think it's good to know more than the average guy. If I'm in a bar now and some pretty girl is talking to some handsome 24-year-old man, I'll say, "Okay, who's the emperor after Caligula? What chief mistake did Marcus Aurelius make in choosing a successor?" He'll just look like an idiot. She'll just gravitate toward me, I'm thinking. It works in Detroit.

It's really nice to have someone who's intelligent and articulate to talk to about what you're doing, because it's a big part of who we are.

French schools follow a national curriculum that includes arduous surveys of French philosophy and literature. Frenchmen then spend the rest of their lives quoting Proust to one another, with hardly anyone else catching the references.

All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.

I would like to sit down with Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, PJ Harvey, and Bjork. That would be a good dinner in my mind. Strong women. I think I would enjoy that.

I love the idea of the literary salons in France where artists and writers would all come and talk and drink absinthe.

I'd really like to go on a date with Stephen Hawking. I just think we'd have really good chat. I'd just like to sit and listen to him.

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching.

One day, my youngest uncle - the other one who was first to go to college, Randy - and I were sitting out on the front porch. And he was brilliant. He ended up - he just retired from Boeing Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas.

I don't think men approach me for intellectual conversation.

I was introduced to Mr. Davy, who has rooms adjoining mine (in the Royal Institution); he is a very agreeable and intelligent young man, and we have interesting conversation in an evening; the principal failing in his character as a philosopher is that he does not smoke.

He (Ted Simmons) didn't sound like a baseball player. He said things like 'nevertheless' and 'if, in fact.

When I was 17, I was at La Coupole brasserie, and Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir asked me to join them at their table. They were fascinated that I'd watched their programme on existentialism back home and wanted to understand nothingness and being.

It's not all about looks. If someone can sustain a good intellectual 'conversation, I find that very 'attractive.

I wandered through the stacks, running my hands along the spines of the books on the shelves, they reminded me of cultured or opinionated guests at a wonderful party, whispering to each other.

More like the movie where the guy meets a smart girl who wears a lot of sweaters and drinks cocoa. They talk about books and issues and kiss in the rain.

Oh! I don't think I would like to catch a sensible man. I shouldn't know what to talk to him about.