Quotes About Thinking

I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkey's.

But research shows that rumination does exactly the opposite: our ability to solve problems actually deteriorates markedly during rumination.

your neocortex is the part of your brain that tracks time.

There's even less acceptance of bisexuality than homosexuality. Binary thinking still holds strong sway with the general population, and the exclusive homosexual is more understandable to the average person than is an individual who wanders the Kinsey scale with apparent—and alarming—abandon.

Being the rational animal, man must be capable of thinking if he really wants to. Still, it may be that man wants to think, but cannot.

Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins. In ihrer Behausung wohnt der Mensch. Die Denkenden und Dichtenden sind die Wächter dieser Behausung. Ihr Wachen ist das Vollbringen der Offenbarkeit des Seins, insofern sie diese durch ihr Sagen zur Sprache bringen und in der Sprache aufbewahren.

Only in thoughtful dialogue with what it says can this fragment of thinking be translated. However, thinking is poetizing, and indeed more than one kind of poetizing, more than poetry and song.

Philosophy, then, is that thinkins with which one can start nothing and about which housemaids necessarily laugh. Such a definition of philosophy is not a mere joke but is something to think over. We shall fo well to remember occasionally that by our strolling we can fall into a well whereby we may not reach ground for quite some time.

To modern metaphysics, the Being of beings appears as will. But inasmuch as man, because of his nature as the thinking animal and by virtue of forming ideas, is related to beings in their Being, is thereby related to Being, and is thus determined by Being—therefore man's being, in keeping with this relatedness of Being (which now means, of the will) to human nature, must emphatically appear as a willing.

Thought has the gift of thinking back, a gift given because we incline toward it

Our thinking today is charged with the task to think what the Greeks have thought in an even more Greek manner.

Philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor. Only a God can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poeticizing, for the appearance of the God or for the absence of the God in the time of foundering for in the face of the God who is absent, we founder. Only a God can save us.

The greatest nearness of the last god eventuates when the event, as the hesitant self-withholding, is elevated into refusal. The latter is essentially other than sheer absence. Refusal, as belonging to the event, can be experienced only on the basis of the more originary essence of beyng as lit up in the thinking

What we come across is only this - various tunings of thinking. Doubt and despair, on the one hand, blind obsession by untested principles, on the other, conflict with one another. Fear and anxiety are mixed with hope and confidence. Often and widely, it looks as though thinking were a kind of reasoning conception and calculation completely free of any kind of tuning. But even the coldness of calculation, even the prosaic sobriety of planning are traits of an attunement.

But anyone who only expects thinking to give assurances, and awaits the day when we can go beyond it as unnecessary, is demanding that thought annihilate itself.

Certainly, dialectic is a magnificent thing. But one never finds the dialectic, as if it were a mill which exists somewhere and into which one empties whatever one chooses, or whose mechanism one could modify according to taste and need.

The task of the grounding of Da-sein by way of thinking and poetry overcomes the question of possibility. That question—How is such and such possible?—is the last implementation of mathematical thinking, which is the result of the dominance of the proposition as such, which in turn is the result of the collapse of ???????.

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

In general, we're least aware of what our minds do best.

We can't waste our time thinking about such things," she said. "Nothing is bleaker than the future, except perhaps the past.

I have coined the term 'bisociation' in order to make a distinction between the routine skills of thinking on a single 'plane', as it were, and the creative act, which, as I shall try to show, always operates on more than one plane. The former may be called single-minded, the latter a double-minded, transitory state of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both emotion and thought is disturbed.

The conditions for original thinking are when two or more streams of research begin to offer evidence that they may converge and so in some manner be combined. It is the combination which can generate new directions of research, and through these it may be found that basic units and activities may have properties not before suspected which open up a lot of new questions for experimental study.

there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?

Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own.