Selected cognition quotes

1. There cannot be mental atrophy in any person who continues to observe, to remember what he observes, and to seek answers for his unceasing hows and whys about things.

2. The soul never thinks without a picture.

3. People are said to believe in God, or to disbelieve in Adam and Eve. But in such cases what is believed or disbelieved is that there is an entity answering a certain description. This, which can be believed or disbelieved is quite different from the actual entity (if any) which does answer the description. Thus the matter of belief is, in all cases, different in kind from the matter of sensation or presentation, and error is in no way analogous to hallucination. A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

4. I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

5. Whatever we know without inference is mental.

6. Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

7. When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.

8. People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.

9. The two principles of truth, reason and senses, are not only both not genuine, but are engaged in mutual deception. The senses deceive reason through false appearances, and the senses are disturbed by passions, which produce false impressions.

10. Our faculties are more fitted to recognize the wonderful structure of a beetle than a Universe.

11. Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.

12. I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.

13. By an object, I mean anything that we can think, i.e. anything we can talk about.

14. The human understanding is moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination; and then it feigns and supposes all other things to be somehow, though it cannot see how, similar to those few things by which it is surrounded.

15. Much learning does not teach understanding.

16. During the earliest stages of thought, accommodation remains on the surface of physical as well as social experience.

17. Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.

18. Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

19. The random quantum fluctuations of my brain are historical accidents that happen to have decided that the concepts of dynamic scoping and lexical scoping are orthogonal and should remain that way.

20. Computer is not a device anymore. It is an extension of your mind and your gateway to other people.

21. We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God.

22. We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.

23. I think visual literacy and media literacy is not without value, but I think plain old-fashioned text literacy and mathematical literacy are much more powerful and flexible ways to organize your mind.

24. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.

25. It is man's own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind grows torpid in old age.

26. Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.

27. I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.

28. I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether.

29. Evolution has ensured that our brains just aren't equipped to visualise 11 dimensions directly. However, from a purely mathematical point of view it's just as easy to think in 11 dimensions, as it is to think in three or four.

30. Why should things be easy to understand?

31. Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.

32. The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.

33. Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.

34. After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.

35. The mind cannot foresee its own advance.

36. The mind moves by instincts, associations and premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated: notions will be first defined long after they are dead.

37. Wisdom is one thing - to know how to make true judgment, how all things are steered through all things.

38. He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

39. Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

40. Highly intelligent and well-informed people disagree on every political issue. Therefore, intelligence and knowledge are useless for making decisions, because if any of that stuff helped, then all the smart people would have the same opinions. So use your 'gut instinct' to make voting choices. That is exactly like being clueless, but with the added advantage that you'll feel as if your random vote preserved democracy.

41. All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

42. Reason does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order to gradually progress from one level of insight to another.

43. The logical picture of the facts is the thought. (3)

44. Experience teaches that a strong memory is generally joined to a weak judgment.

45. Action is the real measure of intelligence.

46. Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

47. 'The Law of the Persistence of Entities: The natural tendency of ideas to exist, to resist the inevitable, and to persist.'

48. The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

49. Knowledge is not a passion from without the mind, but an active exertion of the inward strength, vigour and power of the mind, displaying itself from within.

50. Variants: Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed, for everybody thinks he is so well supplied with it, that even those most difficult to please in all other matters never desire more of it than they already possess. Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have. Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has.

51. Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it. Accepting that a virus might be difficult to detect in your own mind, what tell-tale signs might you look out for? I shall answer by imaging how a medical textbook might describe the typical symptoms of a sufferer (arbitrarily assumed to be male).

52. It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe.

53. A rush of wind comes furiously now, down from the mountaintop. 'The ancient Greeks,' I say, 'who were the inventors of classical reason, knew better than to use it exclusively to foretell the future. They listened to the wind and predicted the future from that. That sounds insane now. But why should the inventors of reason sound insane?'

54. Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word 'quality' cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.

55. The solutions all are simple... after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

56. How does thought take shape?

57. As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.

58. There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.

59. Point of view is worth 80 IQ points

60. We produce these representations in and from ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider spins. If we are forced to comprehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all things we actually comprehend nothing but these forms. For they must all bear within themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number which is most astonishing in things. All that conformity to law, which impresses us so much in the movement of the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties which we bring to things. Thus it is we who impress ourselves in this way