7. There are rational beings with mental powers surpassing those of humans who have a deeper insight into mathematics than we do.

One of the supreme achievements of purely intellectual human activity.

I know that there are many heads which cannot comprehend and master a proposition in political economy. I believe that study is the highest exercise of the human mind.

The highest level than can be reached by a mediocre but experienced mind is a talent for uncovering the weaknesses of those greater than itself.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius; selection between them is the highest science; their mass is the highest educator. Man always made, and still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random from the heap, but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshipped as God.

Although all the qualities of mind may be united in a great genius, yet there are some which are special and peculiar to him; his views are unlimited; he always acts uniformly and with the same activity; he sees distant objects as if present; he comprehends and grasps the greatest, sees and notices the smallest matters; his thoughts are elevated, broad, just and intelligible. Nothing escapes his observation, and he often finds truth in spite of the obscurity that hides her from others. A lofty mind always thinks nobly, it easily creates vivid, agreeable, and natural fancies, places them in their best light, clothes them with all appropriate adornments, studies others' tastes, and clears away from its own thoughts all that is useless and disagreeable.

You think: you become that thought. And consciousness, or the state of pure awareness, is lost. The highest knowledge man can possess is that which is true in his own experience. If his experience is limited, so is his knowledge and he behaves accordingly.

Therefore understanding that rests in what it does not understand is the finest.

Depth psychology has demolished the optimistic faith of democrats in the rationality of a free citizenry, by discovering that the average citizen (in or out of a crowd) is not rational. But this is no reason to despair. There remains what is for Freud perhaps the highest rationality: knowledge of the irrational, a knowledge which may be used […] to arrive at rational decisions essential to democracy.

Understanding that rests in what it does not understand is the finest.

Those in whom the faculty of reason is predominant, and who most skillfully dispose their thoughts with a view to render them clear and intelligible, are always the best able to persuade others of the truth of what they lay down, though they should speak only in the language of Lower Brittany, and be wholly ignorant of the rules of rhetoric; and those whose minds are stored with the most agreeable fancies, and who can give expression to them with the greatest embellishment and harmony, are still the best poets, though unacquainted with the art of poetry.

The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.

I like to think of criticism as the highest intellectual effort that mankind is capable of, and above all, I like to think of self-criticism as the most difficult attainment of an educated man.

The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.