Eco sees the intellectual as an organizer of culture, someone who can run a magazine or a museum. An administrator, in fact. I think this is a melancholy situation for an intellectual.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
An intellectual is someone who avoids the mundane by lowering his handicap.
The intellectual takes as a starting point his self and relates the world to his own sensibilities; the scientist accepts an existing field of knowledge and seeks to map out the unexplored terrain.
To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.
To me, an intellectual is a person who is primarily interested in ideas. What I am is an aesthete, a person who is primarily interested in beauty. That's why I write about art.
To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.
I am not an intellectual. An intellectual is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso, whereas I just say 'pass the mustard'.
The way I think of it, economics and ecology occupy two intellectual silos, isolated from each other. Even when they do take each other into consideration, it's not uncommon for ecologists to spout absolute nonsense about economics, and vice versa.
An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.
I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.