Intellectual Joy Quotes

Being a professional philosopher is, I would say, feeling natural to think about small and great problems. It is the only pleasure.

They enjoy thinking. They enjoy being creative. They enjoy having ideas. Most people do not enjoy thinking at all.

To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.

Some mathematician, I believe, has said that true pleasure lies not in the discovery of truth, but in the search for it.

Mental pleasures never cloy; unlike those of the body, they are increased by reputation, approved by reflection, and strengthened by enjoyment.

Pleasures of the mind have this advantage,--they never cloy nor wear themselves out, but increase by employment.

In-depth studies have an influence on general ideas, whereas theories, in turn, in order to maintain themselves, push their spectators to search for new evidence. The mind's activity that is maintained by the debates about these works, is probably the source of the greatest joys given to man to experience on Earth.

We're losing track of the vastness of the potential for computer science. We really have to revive the beautiful intellectual joy of it, as opposed to the business potential.

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.

At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. This was one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined there was anything so delicious in the world. From that moment until I was thirty-eight, mathematics was my chief interest and my chief source of happiness.

We are an intelligent species and the use of our intelligence quite properly gives us pleasure. In this respect the brain is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good. Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.

There is in this world no real delight (excepting those of sensuality), but exchange of ideas in conversation.

To make knowledge valuable, you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom.

To go back and read Swift and Defoe and Samuel Johnson and Smollett and Pope - all those people we had to read in college English courses - to read them now is to have one of the infinite pleasures in life.

A scientist worthy of his name, about all a mathematician, experiences in his work the same impression as an artist; his pleasure is as great and of the same nature.

All their sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I find in Plato; alas good folk, they never felt what true pleasure meant.

There are two things I enjoy most about my work. First, I get to work with interesting and enthusiastic people who are also fired up about science. Second, every once in a while I have moments in which I suddenly understand the solution to a problem that I've been working on - those are great moments.

The highest, most varied and lasting pleasures are those of the mind.

When I read educational articles it often seems to me that this important side of the matter, the purely personal side, is not emphasized enough; the fact that it is so much more agreeable and interesting to be an educated person than not. The sheer pleasure of being educated does not seem to be stressed.

The joy of discovery is certainly the liveliest that the mind of man can ever feel.

The joy of the mind is the measure of its strength.

There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that - perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims.