Quotes About Thinking

When I start a new seminar I tell my students that I will undoubtedly contradict myself, and that I will mean both things. But an acceptance of contradiction is no excuse for fuzzy thinking. We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledge that they cannot take us all the way.

The obligations of normal human kindness—chesed, as the Hebrew has it—that we all owe. But there's a kind of vanity in thinking you can nurse the world. There's a kind of vanity in goodness.

Not that I'm any kind of authority but I do know that hours and hours are spent in Frankie's flat, in cafes and after lectures, talking about men and what they are thinking and what they're planning…and it seems to turn out in the end that they're not thinking about anything or planning anything. I just tell you that in case it's some comfort.

That's what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction—it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on them, rendering you less able to see out, to get out.

Fear and threat also literally shunt energy away from the areas of the brain involved in self-control and abstract reasoning—the exact opposite of what you want when you are trying to teach someone new ways of thinking and acting.

Flowers lead to books, which lead to thinking and not thinking and then more flowers and music, music. Then many more flowers and many more books.

We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don't spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options.

Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else's and says, angrily, 'I don't buy it.' Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head—even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.

I feel I change my mind all the time. And I sort of feel that's your responsibility as a person, as a human being – to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don't contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you're not thinking.

There are, I think, two important lessons here. The first is that truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking. [...] The second lesson is that in good decision making, frugality matters

Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive.

Our unconscious thinking is, in one critical respect, no different from our conscious thinking: in both, we are able to develop our rapid decision making with training and experience.

Panic, in this sense, is the opposite of choking. Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. They may look the same, but they are worlds apart.

Truly succesful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.

Improvisation comedy is a wonderful example of the kind of thinking that Blink is about. It involves make very sophisticated decisions on the spur of the moment without the benefit of any kind of script or plot. That's what makes it so compelling and — to be frank — terrifying.

starts to think out loud. It's obvious she's on the verge of figuring something out. "Well, I knew this, though… but… I knew that. For each one up, it goes that many over. I'm still somewhat confused as

The introduction to the 1 vs. 100 episode pointed out that Einstein had an IQ of 150 and Langan has an IQ of 195. Langan's IQ is 30 percent higher than Einstein's. But that doesn't mean Langan is 30 percent smarter than Einstein. That's ridiculous. All we can say is that when it comes to thinking about really hard things like physics

Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. Not the kind of writing that you'll find in this book, anyway. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head — even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.

Perhaps the most common—and the most important—forms of rapid cognition are the judgments we make and the impressions we form of other people. Every waking minute that we are in the presence of someone, we come up with a constant stream of predictions and inferences about what that person is thinking and feeling

they have to overcome a hurdle, they'll overcome it better when you force them to think a little harder.

This is the price we pay for the many benefits of the locked door. When we ask people to explain their thinking -- particularly thinking that comes from the unconscious -- we need to be careful in how we interpret their answers.

By making people think about jam, Wilson and Schooler turned them into jam idiots.

Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail.

When I look at the success I have, it's because of my creative thinking skills.