Alan’s Reviews > The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods > Status Update

''Society is a book to read, even though a common place book. Solitude is a masterpiece; but remember the saying of Leibnitz, who found no book so bad that he could not get something out of it. You do not drink alone, just as you do not think with your intelligence alone.''

''. . . to find the right balance between the life within and the life without, between silence and sound. Solitude enables you to make contact with your self, a necessity if you want to realize yourself. . . We are not pleading for a solitude without a purpose. The sacrifice of intercourse with our brethren and of their sympathy
carries a compensation.''

Minds can only communicate through the body.

''Study carried to such a point that we give up prayer and recollection, that we cease to read Holy Scripture, and the words of the saints and of great souls — study carried to the point of forgetting our¬ selves entirely, and of concentrating on the objects of study so that we neglect the Divine Dweller within us, is an abuse and a fool's game''

''Is it not a sacrilege to play with the questions that dominate life and death, with mysterious nature, with God— to achieve some literary or philosophical celebrity at the expense of the true and independently of the true?''
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''To get something without paying for it is the universal desire; but it is the desire of cowardly hearts and weak brains.''

"An intellectual must always be ready to think, that is, to take in part of the truth conveyed to him by the universe, and prepared for him, at such and such turning-point, by Providence."
- Preface to the book by Sertillanges