Quotes about thinking

When in the course of human events somebody does something that puts somebody else to the trouble of adjusting the numb routine of his life, the adjustee is resentful. The richer he is and the more satisfactory he considers his life, the more resentful he is at any change, however minute. And of all the changes which offend people, changes which require them to think are most disliked.

Mankind has never been renowned for accepting logical solutions to its most serious problems. As a rule, the degre of logicality of solutions seemed to vary inversely with the urgency or seriousness of the problems.

I try to explain... how to think, rather than what to think.

My people didn’t use mysterious powers to track you; we used deduction. Much more reliable.

Fear was like poison to mortals; it killed their rationality.

“They follow the creed of the Bright: that which disturbs the order of society must be eliminated, regardless of whether it caused the disturbance.” She rolled her eyes. “You’d think they’d get tired of parroting Itempas and start thinking for themselves after two thousand years.”

At a bare minimum, understanding entails being able to detect an internal contradiction: a paradox.

Certainly no valid answer is ever gained by excluding any factors of the problem; that was the Puritans’ error.

It takes enormous effort to avoid all theories and just see.

One of the most difficult features of direct experience is that it is unfiltered by any theories or expectations. It's hard to observe without imposing a theory to explain what we're seeing, but the trouble with theories, as Einstein said, is that they explain not only what is observed, but what can be observed. We start to build expectations based on our theories.

The mind is the reality. You are what you think.

And now I understand something so frightening, and wonderful — how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar.