Quotes About Thinking

Nothing like a spider in the mouth to get you thinking.

Acea hot?râre determinat? de tinereÈ›e. ... Prea lipsiÈ›i de experien?? ca s? gândeasc? înainte de a acÈ›iona.

When we latch on to an identity, it's easy to take offence. But we offend ourselves. We lock ourselves into very rigid ways of seeing and thinking and reacting.

The most challenging part of programming is conceptualizing the problem, and many errors in programming are conceptual errors. Because

Normand. I can't stop thinking about Bradie and the danger he's in I say. Why? he asks matter of factly. He'll be back. The skeleton key starts spinning You said he'd be different! I say. He's been taken by agents. Of course that will alter him, he says. He'll be broken, I realize out loud. Broken things can often be fixed, Normand says. His words catch me off guard. I'm pretty sure he has no idea that hes said exactly the right thing. The skeleton key stops spinning and the gat pops open.

For emotion is the enemy of rational argument.

Most people are too busy to rethink the way they think—or to even spend much time thinking at all.

In a complex world where people can be atypical in an infinite number of ways, there is great value in discovering the baseline. And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking - our daily decisions, our laws, our governance - on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality.

The absurdly talented George Bernard Shaw—a world-class writer and a founder of the London School of Economics—noted this thought deficit many years ago. "Few people think more than two or three times a year," Shaw reportedly said. "I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week." We too try to think once.

Shaw reportedly said. "I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

even the smartest people tend to seek out evidence that confirms what they already think, rather than new information that would give them a more robust view of reality.

Of course, ideas can always be misleading—but then so can numbers. Still, we advance by learning new ways to think, even if those ways are not infallible. Much

No doubt some of the euphoria about the Internet's egalitarian promise was overstated, and some advocates did veer into genuine Net utopianism at times. But the people I was interested in were not evangelists for the Internet itself. For them, the Internet was not a cure-all; it was a role model. It wasn't the solution to the problem, but a way of thinking about the problem. One

That cognitive overlap is what makes this mode so innovative. The current project can exapt ideas from the projects at the margins, make new connections. It is not so much a question of thinking outside the box, as it is allowing the mind to move through multiple boxes.

Well, for starters, the obvious: we all seem to agree genius begins with feats of mental greatness. The thinking needs to be novel, so the results need to be beyond what most can envision. As it takes courage to push past the confines of culture, the thinking must also be brave. Because an athlete's canvas is nothing more than his body moving through space and time, then an act of genius must also be defined as an act of redefinition–redefining what is possible for the human body.

Guilford also realized that divergent thinking wasn't entirely free wheeling: It had four core characteristics. Fluency, the ability to produce a great number of ideas in a short time-frame; flexibility, the ability to approach a problem from multiple angles; originality, the ability to produce novel ideas; elaboration, the ability to organize those ideas and execute on them.

Computation has finally demystified mentalistic terms. Beliefs are inscriptions in memory, desires are goal inscriptions, thinking is computation, perceptions are inscriptions triggered by sensors, trying is executing operations triggered by a goal.

Western philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge, ethics, and reality, but a succession of conceptual metaphors. Descartes's philosophy is based on KNOWING IS SEEING, Locke's on the MIND IS A CONTAINER, Kant's on MORALITY IS A STRICT FATHER, and so on.

They matters of correct usage pale in importance behind coherence, classic style, and overcoming the curse of knowledge, to say nothing of standards of intellectual conscientiousness. If you really want to improve the quality of your writing, or if you want to thunder about sins in the writing of others, the principles you should worry about the most are not the ones that govern fused participles and possessive antecedents by the ones that govern critical thinking and factual diligence.

Literate people should know how to think about grammar.

concocting a statement that you have trouble believing in the first place (such as "A herring is a mammal"), and then negating it, requires two bouts of cognitive heavy lifting rather than one.

The beauty of reason is that it can always be applied to understand failures of reason.

A respect for scientific thinking is, adamantly, not the belief that all current scientific hypotheses are true. Most new ones are not.

In this way of thinking, government is not a divine fiat to reign, a synonym for "society," or an avatar of the national, religious, or racial soul.