A Quote by W. H. Auden

The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.

W. H. Auden

Quote Topics

Basic Doubt Evident Experience Feeling Intelligence Meaning Meaning Of Self Self-Evident Stimulus

Quote Author

W. H. Auden
English - Poet
February 21, 1907 - September 29, 1973

If you have to keep telling us that Hillary Clinton’s uber-qualified, there must be some doubt about it. It must not be self-evident. It must not be apparent. And the reason it is not apparent and self-evident is because it isn’t true. The woman is no more qualified to be president than anybody else.

Rush Limbaugh

The basic nature of all conscious beings is 'self-existing wakefulness'. Self-existing meaning spontaneous or without effort and wakefulness meaning natural awareness. To ignore our basic nature, is to wander in fear and confusion, to directly realise our essential nature is to be Enlightened.

Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche

[My novels] introduce levels of intelligence ... moral doubt [and] self-doubt, which may not pertain [to real-world espionage].

John le Carre

Essentially, I mean the almost self-evident fact that individuals, ethnic groups, and races differ among themselves in intelligence and in many other traits, and that intelligence, as well as less controversial traits of temperament, are in large part hereditary.

Murray Rothbard

The whole body-mind thing comes into play, when you are feeling that self-doubt and your body is not going to help you if you're not paying attention. Your body's going to go with the self-doubt and make you feel worse, so by making the adjustments - pulling your shoulders back, standing up straight, walking in a more sort of expansive way - all sorts of little things will help pull you out of that self-doubt.

Amy Cuddy

Here in Sweden and the Nordic countries, we have come a relatively long way when it comes to LGBTQI rights. But what we see as self-evident or at least would like to believe is self-evident - is unthinkable in other parts of the world.

Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden

There are many different kinds of doubt. When we doubt the future, we call it worry. When doubt other people we call is suspicion. When we doubt ourselves we call it inferiority. When we doubt God we call it unbelief. When we doubt what we hear on television we call it intelligence! When we doubt everything we call it cynicism or skepticism.

Rick Warren

Self-evident, adj. Evident to one's self and to nobody else.

Ambrose Bierce

I doubt not, but from self-evident Propositions, by necessary Consequences, as incontestable as those in Mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out.

John Locke

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.

Robert Hughes

Everyone is walking around with these self doubts, so there's something reassuring about that. And self-doubt in one or a few areas doesn't mean that you have generally low self-esteem. And you have the power to get yourself out of feeling that way.

Amy Cuddy

For just as the first general precepts of the law of nature are self-evident to one in possession of natural reason, and have no need of promulgation, so also that of believing in God is primary and self-evident to one who has faith: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is.

Thomas Aquinas

An intelligent being, is the active principle of all things. One must have renounced all common sense to doubt it, and it is a waste of time to try to prove such self evident truth.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

There's a reason you can learn from everything: you have basic wisdom, basic intelligence, and basic goodness.

Pema Chodron

It would help if human experts agreed on the meaning of such basic terms as intelligence, consciousness, or awareness. They don't. It's hard to build something that's incompletely defined.