Albert Einstein

[angelok]

How you understand such quatation as "intellect has powerful muscles, but no personality"

 

[Senna Jawa]

How you understand such quatation as "intellect has powerful muscles, but no personality"

Do you need help with your essay? Then you need to follow the Literotica guidance and rules.

 

[foehn2]

?

Did I miss something, here? Was that a brush-off? If so, why?

Seemed like a good question, on the surface, but there may be history I'm lacking, here.

Einstein had lots of wonderful quotes. He was pawed-over, after he achieved some notoriety, by the press, and those boys and girls seem ever-insistent about putting quotations in concrete.

The rest of us come up with nice quotations, too, but are largely ignored.

As far as the question about the quote, I think the understanding is not far from the words. Einstein was more of a poet than most people might want to recognize, and he was simply saying (perhaps) that intellect is a nice tool, but there is no love there.

The loveliest quotes are open to various interpretations. (my opinion)

 

[Angeline]

How you understand such quatation as "intellect has powerful muscles, but no personality"

I have no idea. Maybe Einstein saw intellect as purely objective.

It's an interesting question for a bunch of poets. Or maybe Senna has it right.

 

[staciliv]

How you understand such quatation as "intellect has powerful muscles, but no personality"

Open to interpertation. I'd frame this in the context or the relatively recent notion of E.Q., or Emotional Quotient.

Most people are familiar with I.Q., or Intelligence Quotient. Thought by some to be fixed at birth, one can possibly enhance it somewhat but only in a narrow range. This is the traditional "intellect".

Emotional quotient, on the other hand, refers to the manner and successfullness of our dealings with others. Can you bargain for the best price for a new car? Easily meet new people? Are you well liked? To some extent we are born with our E.Q., but mostly these are learned behaviors. We can (should we so desire) raise our E.Q. by studying and working at it.

I think this is what Einstein meant by his quote. Many so called intellectual geniuses have no friends and live unhappy, miserable, unfulfilling lives. They have superior intellect - but no personality. The two traits are not linked; a person may have one without the other.

 

[Angeline]

Open to interpertation. I'd frame this in the context or the relatively recent notion of E.Q., or Emotional Quotient.

Most people are familiar with I.Q., or Intelligence Quotient. Thought by some to be fixed at birth, one can possibly enhance it somewhat but only in a narrow range. This is the traditional "intellect".

Emotional quotient, on the other hand, refers to the manner and successfullness of our dealings with others. Can you bargain for the best price for a new car? Easily meet new people? Are you well liked? To some extent we are born with our E.Q., but mostly these are learned behaviors. We can (should we so desire) raise our E.Q. by studying and working at it.

I think this is what Einstein meant by his quote. Many so called intellectual geniuses have no friends and live unhappy, miserable, unfulfilling lives. They have superior intellect - but no personality. The two traits are not linked; a person may have one without the other.

That's just what the quote made me think about--that there are different kinds of intelligence. My grandfather used to say you could be as smart as Einstein but if you didn't have any common sense, what good is the intellect?

I also think there is artistic intelligence. Some people simply seem better equipped than others to create or respond to art of various kinds. And I don't know that it can be learned.

 

[unpredictablebijou]

How you understand such quatation as "intellect has powerful muscles, but no personality"

The post is unclear to me. Do you mean:

How do you (does one) go about understanding quotations like...?
How do we as individuals in this particular forum interpret that specific quotation?
Or is it not a question at all, since there is no question mark? Is it the beginning of a thesis statement, as in, "This is how you (how one, how I) understand this quotation, or quotations like this"?

It is a fine quote, if nothing else.

bj

 

[Tzara]

In re: "Quatation"

How you understand such quatation as "intellect has powerful muscles, but no personality"

I tried to look this quote up on the Internet, mainly to see if it was originally in German, and what that original text might have been, which could have considerably changed what I might have thought Professor Einstein meant.

What I found was a somewhat different quotation. Specifically: "We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality." (For example, as found here.)

These sentences aren't all that much different, but they are different.

The original one quoted on this thread seems to me to be wrong, or, at least, limited in scope. The word "intellect" in this context to me is synonymous with something like "logic." I'm perfectly happy with a statement like: Logic has powerful muscles, but no personality.

I mean, I don't want logic to have personality. Not what it is for. It's there to sift statements and convictions through the screens of consistency and believablilty to end up with something we can all accept as reasonable.

So that first conception of the statement is OK, so far as it goes. But I don't think that is what's meant.

So, the second quote, which cranks the whole thing into a moral statement about the nature of intellect. Intellect is, in this view, something one might use to sift or evaluate experience with. It ain't, though, a moral code.

Logic, or intellect, or smartiness, can help you work your way through some of the confusion that confronts all of us in the real world, but it of itself can't make the decisions about what those values are. Those value decisions—the logical premisses, in effect—come from some non-logical place.

There ain't nowhere else for them to come from, at least as far as I've been able to determine, but I am not philosopher.

One reason why I miss Eluard.

 

[twelveoone]

There ain't nowhere else for them to come from, at least as far as I've been able to determine, but I am not philosopher.

seem to be doing pretty good with it

One reason why I miss Eluard.

yeh I miss him too, except he seems to be lacking a serious sense of fun, and that was just god damn stupid, to say those things about me. i.e. how would he know what I was doing in the 60's, unless of course He mastered the fourth dimension,
nah, the asshole probably glanced at this

or to quote it :
*maroon*

oh yeh, Einstein
"God does not play dice with the universe"

he plays three card monte on me.

 

[foehn2]

"Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice." — Albert Einstein, 1926, in a letter to Max Born.

God is often misquoted, too. But most people, fallible pulpy gray stuff firmly tucked into somewhat fragile skulls, have the right intention. Actually, He may have only spoken one word, at the outset. It's interesting to ponder.

(I like the word, "maroon," and twelve-o-one gives it more adequate honors.)