Quotes About Thinking

The core of his argument is that rationality should be distinguished from intelligence.

It is tempting to explain entrepreneurial optimism by wishful thinking, but emotion is only part of the story. Cognitive biases play an important role, notably the System 1 feature WYSIATI.

His ego was depleted after a long day of meetings. So he just turned to standard operating procedures instead of thinking through the problem.

Conscious doubt is not in the repertoire of System 1; it requires maintaining incompatible interpretations in mind at the same time, which demands mental effort. Uncertainty and doubt are the domain of System 2.

good judgments depend on what you know, how well you think, and how you think.

Maybe Francis Bacon had it wrong—at least in Ayer's case. Instead of finding meaning in religion as the result of studying philosophy in depth, Ayer found that meaning by not thinking like a philosopher at all for a few divine moments.

I wonder if I have a problem. I definitely have a tendency to seek spiritual inspiration from super-rational thinkers rather than from rabbis and priests and theologians.

Being prepared to receive what thought is not prepared to think is what deserves the name of thinking.

Once one has experienced emptiness, he is not likely to fall back to egoic thinking, unless he has an impulse to ignorance.

The Western world, he believed, was afflicted by the curse of short-term thinking, the inevitable result of democracy.

Any self-help program that discourages me from thinking for myself, that is, from tweaking what I've learned to understand myself is suspect. Growth is all about thinking creatively, and I can't very well do that if I take on the role of parrot.

Harvard—a place, I slowly came to understand, that could teach me many things, including how to think, but that could not teach me goodness. Not because it taught the opposite, but because moral education is simply not what secular Western education or secular Western culture is for.

Poverty thinking is always focused on other people's money, and it often gets obsessively focused on an unbiblical notion of equality (which we'll discuss in more detail in the next chapter). If there are two people in a room, one rich and one broke, then a modern-day Robin Hood should come in, take the rich person's money, and give it to the broke person. The fact that Robin Hood was a thief isn't important.

The whole of science, and one is tempted to think the whole of the life of any thinking man, is trying to come to terms with the relationship between yourself and the natural world. Why are you here, and how do you fit in, and what's it all about.

For a long time, I used to think that I had a man's brain that I thought more like a man than a woman. But now I've come to realise that whatever it is I do think like, it's not like men; because men don't really think like men, they think like boys.

It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

When on the last night of his lizard existence he laid his bulging brain case again in that hollow of mosses where there was the most dimness, he knew in his blood that on the morrow, when he awoke into his doom as a thinking creature, he would be old with that age which curses those who have never even for an instant been young. Tomorrow he would be a thinking creature, but the weariness was on him tonight....

It is important to recognize and politics positive thinking is often the slaves' virtue - something that people do to con themselves about the burden and change being placed upon them.

The only thing more dangerous than a politician who thinks about re-election, is a politician who doesn't think about re-election.

Think of that hard before your emotions jump in and start loaning people money that you will never see again

The Keeper spotted them and approached at a limping run. Thomas noticed he'd let go of Teresa's hand without thinking about it.

the dominant ways of thinking about culture and cultural change are flawed, for they are based on both specious social science and problematic theology.

In Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge, Edelman theorizes that the human brain's astonishing interconnectivity produces consciousness and, because of the astronomical number of associations our brains are capable of making, pattern recognition is the basis not just for metaphorical thinking but for all thinking.

that the unknown can only be made known through metaphor and analogy. "When we pass beyond pointing to individual sensible objects330, when we begin to think of causes, relations, of mental states or acts, we become incurably metaphorical," Lewis wrote. "We apprehend none of these things except through metaphor.