This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Intellect... is a critical, creative, and contemplative side of minds. Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, reorder, adjust, intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines. Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates evaluations, and looks for the meanings of situations as a whole.
Intelligence | Looks | Meaning | Will | Intellect |
Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
The height of intellect is distinguishing between the real and the impossible, and submission to what is beyond one's power.
Power | Submission | Intellect |
Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
Nothing sharpens the intellect like moral instruction.
Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
Patience is even more rarely manifested in the intellect than it is in the temper.
We observe with confidence that the truly strong mind, view it as intellect or morality, or under any other aspect, is nowise the mind acquainted with its strength; that here the sign of health is unconsciousness.
Confidence | Health | Mind | Morality | Strength | Unconsciousness | Intellect |
Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted.
Belief | Conscience | Opinion | Intellect |
Jung equates the unconscious with the soul, and so when we try to live fully consciously in an intellectually predictable world, protected form all mysteries and comfortable with conformity, we lose our everyday opportunities for the soulful life. The intellect wants to know; the soul likes to be surprised. Intellect, looking outward, wants enlightenment and the pleasure of a burning enthusiasm. The soul, always drawn inward, seeks contemplation and the more shadowy, mysterious experience of the underworld.
Conformity | Contemplation | Enlightenment | Enthusiasm | Experience | Life | Life | Pleasure | Soul | Wants | World | Contemplation | Intellect |
Truth is not really a soul word; souls is after insight more than truth. Truth is a stopping point asking for commitment and defense. Insight is a fragment of awareness that invites further exploration. Intellect tends to enshrine its truth, while soul hopes that insights will keep coming until some degree of wisdom is achieved.
Awareness | Commitment | Defense | Insight | Soul | Truth | Will | Wisdom | Awareness | Intellect |
Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
The key to the art of listening is selectivity... Listen critically. Mentally challenge assertions, ideas, philosophies. Seek the truth with an open mind. Listen with your heart... Listen for growth. Be an inquisitive listener. Listen creatively... Listen to yourself. Listen to your deepest yearnings, your highest aspirations, your noblest impulses. Listen to the better man within you. Listen with depth. Be still and meditate. Listen with the ear of intuition for the inspiration of the Infinite.
Art | Better | Challenge | Growth | Heart | Ideas | Inspiration | Intuition | Listening | Man | Mind | Truth | Yearnings | Art |
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
Religion is the last subject that the intellect begins to understand.
Brains and character rule the world. The most distinguished Frenchman of the last century said: “Men succeed less by their talents than their character.” There were scores of men a hundred years ago who had more intellect than Washington. He outlives and overrides them all by the influence of his character.
The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, and if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely thins and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of eh affections and of the will to an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws.
Desire | Education | Harmony | Men | Nature | Will | Instruction | Intellect |
Mystical experience… is a direct intuition of ultimate reality.
Experience | Intuition | Mystical | Reality |
As diamond cuts diamond, and one hone smoothes a second, all the parts of intellect are whetstones to each other; and genius, which is but the result of their mutual sharpening, is character, too.
The body is likened to a small city: like two kings who wage war over a city, each desiring to capture it and rule over it, that is, to govern its inhabitants according to his will so that they obey him in all that he decrees for them, so do the two souls - the G‑dly [soul] and the animal [soul] - wage war against each other over the body and all its organs and limbs. The desire and will of the G‑dly soul is that it alone should rule over the person and direct him, and that all his limbs should obey it and surrender themselves completely to it and become a vehicle for it, and serve as a vehicle for its ten faculties [of intellect and emotion] and three "garments" [thought, speech and action]... and the entire body should be permeated with them alone, to the exclusion of any alien influence, G‑d forbid... While the animal soul desires the very opposite.
Body | Desire | Rule | Soul | Speech | Surrender | War | Will | Govern | Intellect |