Quotes About Thinking

In other words, knowledge arrived at through rational thinking alone, lacking in awareness that engenders wisdom, is a dangerous thing, and the greater the knowledge, the more potentially destructive it becomes.

For that matter, thinking of one's self as exceptional is probably more the rule than not.

That is what kills political writing, this absurd pretense that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think. You are not building the Pantheon.

Tell me about our legal issues. And use small words. I don't like to think at this hour of the morning. It hurts." ~Leo to Merripen

Deadlines refine the mind. They remove variables like exotic materials and processes that take too long. The closer the deadline, the more likely you'll start thinking waaay outside the box.

When I'm writing, I write all day. Other days, I sit around thinking. Or I run around from one meeting to another, out in the world. It varies, and I like that.

There are a variety of techniques to help people change the kind of thinking that leads them to become depressed. These techniques are called cognitive behavioral therapy.

The brain-mind is not a computer, and regarding it as one has led to a variety of theoretical dead ends.

As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking.

The vast majority of students probably emerge from college with an adequate grasp of no more than a single method of inquiry. Even this capacity may erode over time if it does not relate to experiences and problems that recur in the student's later life.

A trial is a powerful vehicle to explain things. It is the most time that anybody spends really thinking about one thing. Unless you are the analyst on the National Security staff that's assigned to monitor Putin, and that's all you do, day in and day out, very few people ever spend the time on a single subject that is spent during trial.

We're still talking about women's rights. We can't be the greatest country in the world. I think once we lose that illusionary veil of thinking that we are, we can face the problems and really try to fix them.

English teachers often take a right-wrong stance. I'd rather my students take a thinking stance.

This discovery led to an important question. How does the brain make predictions? One potential answer is that the brain has two types of neurons: neurons that fire when the brain is actually seeing something, and neurons that fire when the brain is predicting it will see something. To avoid hallucinating, the brain needs to keep its predictions separate from reality. Using two sets of neurons does this nicely. However, there are two problems with this idea.

We realized that the brain's model of the world is built using maplike reference frames. Not one reference frame, but hundreds of thousands of them. Indeed, we now understand that most of the cells in your neocortex are dedicated to creating and manipulating reference frames, which the brain uses to plan and think.

As inspired by Alan Turing, intelligence equals behavior.

There are still very few laws against thinking, although I am sure they're working hard on that in Washington.

There is nothing, no sound, and we are thinking very unhappy thoughts as we kneel down and perform our watery pantomime one more time.

I know it was totally illogical, but I found myself vastly annoyed with Jackie, as if she had butted in on purpose. But to my much greater surprise, I found that I was still aroused in reality, and not just in my imagination. Was it from thinking of the victim—or from thinking about Jackie Forrest? I didn't know, and that was even more annoying.

Then one Sunday morning, before winter break, Abby's boyfriend, Whitney, materialized at their kitchen table, reading something called Of Grammatology. When Madeleine asked what the book was about, she was given to understand by Whitney that the idea of a book being about something was exactly what this book was against, and that, if it was about anything, then it was about the need to stop thinking of books as being about things.

That one body may act upon another at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else…is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has…any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent…but whether this agent be material or immaterial is a question I have left to…my readers.

Thinking is very hard work. And management fashions are a wonderful substitute for thinking.

Of course the fall semester didn't start for another eight weeks or so. There was always a chance we were both being overly optimistic in thinking I'd be alive when it rolled around.

I often arrive at quite sensible ideas and judgements, on the spur of the moment. It is when I stop to think that I become foolish.