119 Quotations Found

It’s only by taking myself away from clutter and distraction that I can begin to hear something out of earshot and recall that listening is much more invigorating than giving voice to all the thoughts and prejudices that anyway keep me company twenty-four hours a day. And it’s only by going nowhere — by sitting still or letting my mind relax — that I find … [ Read more ]

Author: Pico Iyer | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management, Thought | Inquiry

It is hardly possible to overrate the value […] of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. […] Such communication has always been […] one of the primary sources of progress.

Author: John Stuart Mill | Subjects: Communication, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Thought | Inquiry

To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult.

Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Subjects: Action | Accomplishment, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to … [ Read more ]

Author: David Foster Wallace | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

Conspiracy theories are self-perpetuating rationalization machines. They eat facts, distort reality, and destroy relationships. And, by the time someone realizes they’re in too deep, it’s often too late to salvage a reality-based worldview (or the relationships of the people they isolated in the process).

Author: Joe Forrest | Subjects: Concepts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Thought | Inquiry

It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it … [ Read more ]

Author: Carl Sagan | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Math & Science, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

A person who does not know that silent intercourse (in which we examine what we say and what we do) will not mind contradicting himself, and this means he will never be either able or willing to account for what he says or does; nor will he mind committing any crime, since he can count on its being forgotten the next moment.

Author: Hannah Arendt | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions [would be to] lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.

Author: Hannah Arendt | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Concepts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Thought | Inquiry

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually … [ Read more ]

Author: George Orwell | Subjects: Concepts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

If you’re willing to suspend your disbelief, which is the main prerequisite for enjoying fantasy, then you have a compelling story that actually explains the world you live in. If you’re angry, conspiracy theories tell you why your anger is justified. If you feel like a victim, they tell you whom to blame. What could be better than that?

Author: Eliot Borenstein | Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

Your beliefs don’t make you a free thinker. The ability to change your beliefs based on new information does.

Author: Unknown | Subject: Thought | Inquiry

We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception. They mark out certain objects as familiar or strange, emphasizing the difference, so that the slightly familiar is seen as very familiar, and the somewhat strange as sharply alien… Were … [ Read more ]

Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Perception | Observation, Prejudice and Stereotype, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.

Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Prejudice and Stereotype, Thought | Inquiry

Each thing we preconceive blinds us to what actually is — a tendency that, when it rises to the level of social perception in the form of stereotypes, metastasizes into a status quo that makes the powerful all the more powerful and the power-poor all the poorer.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Power, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

To the extent that people do embrace false beliefs, it’s usually as a convenient pretext for views they already hold, actions they already intend, or because a particular falsehood is useful or at least harmless.

Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

God grant me the company of those who seek the truth and God deliver me from those who have found it.

Author: Isaac Newton | Subjects: Thought | Inquiry, Wisdom

Thinking aloud is a habit responsible for much of mankind’s misery.

Author: Benjamin Franklin | Subjects: Thought | Inquiry, Wisdom

It’s asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as to your sense of the aesthetic.

Author: W. Somerset Maugham | Subjects: Beauty | Aesthetics, Thought | Inquiry

The testimony of many has little more value than that of few, since the number of people who reason well in complicated matters is much smaller than that of those who reason badly. If reasoning were like hauling I should agree that several reasoners would be worth more than one, just as several horses can haul more sacks of grain than one can. But reasoning … [ Read more ]

Author: Gaileo | Subject: Thought | Inquiry

Dogma is the enemy of truth and the enemy of persons. Dogma says, “Do not think! Be less than a person.” The ideas enshrined in dogma may include good and wise ideas, but dogma is bad in itself because it is accepted as good without examination.

Authors: M.D., Thomas A. Harris | Subject: Thought | Inquiry