Quotes About Thinking

At the very least, one would hope that by becoming aware of the many ways our brain can trick us, we would arrive at the conclusion Bertrand Russell thought was a necessary consequence of the limits of knowledge: we should be less cocksure of our beliefs, hold them tentatively, and always be on guard against thinking our feeling of absolute certainty implies we're right.

Our natural way of thinking, of making judgments, of identifying causal connections is to jump to conclusions on flimsy evidence.

In your thinking, learn to blend the analytical with the intuitive in order to become more creative.

The human that depended on focused attention for its survival now becomes the distracted scanning animal, unable to think in depth, yet unable to depend on instincts.

They create in our thinking pronounced biases that are so deeply ingrained in us that we see evidence of them in all cultures and all periods of history. These biases, by distorting reality, lead to the mistakes and ineffective decisions that plague our lives. Being aware of them, we can begin to counterbalance their effects.

It is impossible to not have our inclinations and feelings somehow involved in what we think. Rational people are aware of this and through introspection and effort are able, to some extent, to subtract emotions from their thinking and counteract their effect. Irrational people have no such awareness. They rush into action without carefully considering the ramifications and consequences.

We imagine we are looking for the truth, or being realistic, when in fact we are holding on to ideas that bring a release from tension and soothe our egos, make us feel superior. This pleasure principle in thinking is the source of all of our mental biases. If you believe that you are somehow immune to any of the following biases, it is simply an example of the pleasure principle in action

Knowledge, experience, and theory have limitations: no amount of thinking in advance can prepare you for the chaos of life, for the infinite possibilities of the moment.

Most people believe that they are in fact aware of the future, that they are planning and thinking ahead. They are usually deluded: What they are really doing is succumbing to their desires, to what they want the future to be.

Two Kinds of Failure A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions—as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. — FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THE GAY SCIENCE

On the other hand, there is the opposing tendency of the brain to want to make connections between everything. This generally occurs among individuals who pursue knowledge far enough that these associations come to

Low-grade emotions continually affect our thinking, and they originate from our own impulses—for instance, the desire for pleasing and comforting thoughts. High-grade emotion, however, comes at certain moments, reaches an explosive pitch, and is generally sparked by something external—a person who gets under our skin, or particular circumstances. The level of arousal is higher and our attention is captured completely.

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.

The basic technological unemployment narrative is the same, but the examples have a wider scope. First, giant locomotives and electrical power equipment economized on human muscle power. After the mutation, the narrative focused on computers replacing human thinking. This mutation refreshed the narrative.

I've been thinking." Her eyebrows rose, but he was used to surprise whenever he claimed an idea. Even when his ideas were as good as theirs, they always remembered how deliberate he was in thinking of them.

The Light save me from men who think with the hair on their chests. Though I don't know as there are any other kind.

My Lady has been thinking? My Lady must have a headache from all that effort.

He liked being able to think things through. It was easy to hurt people without meaning to when you were hasty.

When a person says, I need to find a job, it's most likely an emotion doing the thinking. Fear of not having money generates that thought. Fear is all too often doing the thinking. Will a job be the best solution to this fear over the long run? No. A job is a short-term solution to a long-term problem. People make the recommendation of a job out of fear.

His work was just barely passing by academic standards at this time, but this wasn't because he wasn't working or thinking. He was thinking too hard, and the harder you think in this high country of the mind the slower you go. Phaedrus read in a scientific way rather than a literary way, testing each sentence as he went along, noting doubts and questions to be resolved later, and I'm fortunate in having a whole trunkful of volumes of these notations

Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined.

Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about. But no one is willing to give up the truth as he sees it, and as far as I know, no one now living has any real reconciliation of these truths or modes.

During sustained stress, the amygdala processes emotional sensory information more rapidly and less accurately, dominates hippocampal function, and disrupts frontocortical function; we're more fearful, our thinking is muddled, and we assess risks poorly and act impulsively out of habit, rather than incorporating new data.

It is life that does the thinking all around us, forming with playful ease the connections our reason can only laboriously patch together piecemeal, and never to such kaleidoscopic effect.