Somewhere I encountered a quote like "the finest art is a life well-lived". This threw me, because, apparently, I had been thinking of art as something different in kind from life, and unrelated to the normal work or act of living. Seen in terms of this quote, art becomes once again of-a-kind with life, and may be seen as only a part of living well, instrumental to living well, or perhaps just as practice for living well.
Something similar seems to be happening with "thinking" and "intelligence". Somehow these things had become ends-in-themselves, separate from the regular act of living. We might wrap them in a similar quote to place them in relation to life, along the lines of "thinking well is for living well", or perhaps "the highest good of the intellect is to be well-fit to the problems of living well".
I am reminded also of a line which stuck with me from Augustine's Confessions, approximately: "The mind is not the supreme good"—as opposed to the body and perhaps the "spirit". Somehow the world I was born into had collectively come to think of the mind as the supreme good, and intelligence as the greatest virtue. But this is, in some way, in contradiction the basic fact of existence and mortality: no amount of cleverness can circumvent death, and all the glory attainable by feats of the intellect are only futile vanities compared to the privilege of being alive itself.
That kind of thing.