Quotes About Thinking

Anti-intellectualism is virtually our civic religion. Critical thinking may be a ubiquitous educational slogan—a vaguely defined skill we hope our children pick up on the way to adulthood—but the rewards for not using your intelligence are immediate and abundant.

however, the reflexive image of the Enemy creates destructive hatred between individuals and between groups. Although these individuals or groups may feel liberated from restraints against attacking the supposed adversary, such people have actually surrendered their freedom of choice, abdicated their rationality, and are now the prisoners of a primal thinking mechanism.

Creative thinking is not stimulated by vicarious issues but by personal problems.

The hysteria of suspicion has made us unreliable to ourselves, trusting neither our aspirations nor our convictions. Suspiciousness, not skepticism, is the beginning of our thinking.

Conceptual thinking is adequate when we are engaged in an effort to enhance our knowledge about the world. Situational thinking is necessary when we are engaged in an effort to understand issues on which we stake our very existence.

This place was not like the Victorian Prisons of England with their imposing red-brick and neo-gothic architecture that was supposed to impress inmates with the power of the state;no, this place looked cobbled together, shoddy and temporary and the only thing it impressed upon you was how current British policy on Ireland was dominated by short-term thinking.

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.

There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.

in Flaubert's eyes, that only entirely illiterate and uneducated Frenchmen now stood a chance of being able to think properly:

Though we can of course use our minds without being in pain, Proust's suggestion is that we become properly inquisitive only when distressed. We suffer, therefore we think, and we do so because thinking helps us to place pain in context. It helps us to understand its origins, plot its dimensions, and reconcile ourselves to its presence.

Higher learning does not preclude the presence of lower minds.

Your high arousal also fuels negative and judgmental thinking, which further fuels negative emotional arousal—a vicious cycle.

To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said. And when people commend someone for "thinking for herself" they usually mean "ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of.

The central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history.

Some people like to talk of intuition as a way of knowing truth; that gut reactions are as good as evidence based facts. Its a really silly way of thinking...

Many things we misread as meaningful are quite ordinary coincidences. For example, its not unlikely that occasionally someone will phone you after youve been thinking about them. But we give these things value to make sense of our lives.

still a part of her future as well as her past. But it was stupid and pointless to think about what might have been.

It may be that Anglicans will have to realize that it is one of the glories of their tradition that it is a tradition without logic or consistency, which depends on the strong clash of opposites, and which in the end provides heroes who are examples of human frailty rather than role-models for uncomplicated courage – which forces the individual to undertake a good deal of hard thinking in order to make sense of the world around, rather than reaching for some simple model in a book.

For we cannot speak of the beginning; where the beginning begins our thinking stops, it comes to an end.

Where the beginning begins, there our thinking stops; there it comes to an end.121

all thinking about human beings without Christ is unfruitful abstraction. The counterimage to the human being taken up into the form of Christ is the human being as self-creator, self-judge, and self-renewer; these people bypass their true humanity and therefore, sooner or later, destroy themselves.

The distinction between objective and personal thinking must truly first be learned. Many people never learn this (look at our colleagues in the ministry! among others).

Negative thinking destroys your brain cells and causes global warming. Source: The Scientific Institute of GetOverIt!

If he could just get rid of the harsh irritation of his conscious thinking, then he would be all right; then he would be at peace