Intelligence

The most precious is that which weighs, sorts, compares and makes choices

August 26th 2025

Everywhere you turn you see boiling passions and desires – almost all human beings are teeming with them. What is rarer, indeed almost impossible to find, is an intelligence that weighs, sorts, compares and makes choices. And yet it is this intelligence that is the most precious.
Unfortunately, human beings want none of it. They say, ‘If we always have to exercise reason and intelligence, we’ll have to give up certain pleasures and make a constant effort to be lucid and in control of ourselves, and we have no wish to do so!’ Those who say such things show how blind and narrow-minded they are, for they would actually be far happier if they were clear-sighted enough to discern the nature of their desires and impulses, and to sort out the good from the bad. How can you be happy if you are blind? When you cannot see, you cannot take precautions to protect yourself; you are at the mercy of whatever comes your way.*
* Related reading:

We often hear and use words like “chance”, “bad luck”, “injustice”: all this inspires a feeling of chaos, of a blind nature. What is it really? There is a connection between all living creatures, as there is a connection between all the cells of the physical body. All our gestures, acts, words,...