We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than the one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character.
The moment you say you learned all you need to know about life is the moment you become a fool
Most of us are acutely aware that we live in a world at war. But the war is not over power, land or money, or even good and evil. It is over something even more basic. The war is over truth, and the battlefield is the mind of every person.
I never blame anyone for the size of their brain, But I do think each person is responsible for the size of their heart. And when one sacrifices the integrity of their own heart to foolishess, they also lose intelligence. Racism is the ultimate expression of a heartless fool.
The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.
I believe that pure thinking will do more to educate a man than any other activity he can engage in. To afford sympathetic entertainment to abstract ideas, to let one idea beget another, and that another, till the mind teems with them; to compare one idea with others, to weigh, to consider, evaluate, approve, respect, correct, refine; to join thought with thought like an architect till a whole edifice has been created within the mind; to travel back in imagination to the beginning of the creation and then to leap swiftly forward to the end of time; to bound upward through illimitable space and downward into the nucleus of an atom; and all this without so much as moving from our chair or opening the eyes – this is to soar above all the lower creation and come near to the angels of God.
A man must first submit to the law of God, and then he will rule as an intelligent being over all around him. His intellect will reign as it was originally created to reign, with judgment and self-restraint, with courage and justice. Now he will calm his wrath with the gentleness of his desire, now quieten his desire with the austerity of his wrath; and he will know that he is a king.