#think

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. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#decisions #ideas #life #significance #thinking

It is possible to induce incorrect notions of cause and effect in most people in just a few minutes. All that is necessary is to expose them to rewards which they believe they are generating based on their actions when in fact the rewards are randomly awarded. People will latch onto any seeming success and repeat it, even when they have to explain repeated failures as well. It appears practically impossible, or at least very rare, for humans not to be influenced by immediate experiences of concrete results. This is true even if the experiences turn out to have limited theoretical validity. The moment of surprise is not when people repeat alchemical failures but when they begin to do something else. ↗

— Naomi Janowitz

#magic #magical-thinking #prayer #religion #ritual

At one time,' Golenishchev continued, either not observing or not willing to observe that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, 'at one time a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conception of religion, law, and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed. They grow up in ideas of negation in everything -- in other words, utter savages. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#freethinking #religion

Our thinking will automatically improve when we remember the words of Paul: 'know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and the spirit of God dwelleth in you? ↗

— Thomas S. Monson

#self-respect #temple #thinking #respect

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#drafts #ideas #insight #notes #thinkers

Propaganda is as powerful as heroin; it surreptitiously dissolves all capacity to think. ↗

— Gil Courtemanche

#propaganda #propaganda

Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat. ↗

— Mother Teresa

#eat #everybody #forgotten #greater #hunger

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#independent-thought #opinions #skepticism #thinking #independence

Whoever controls the media, controls the mind ↗

— Jim Morrison

#media #thinking #control

The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#math #mathematical #problem-solving #thinking #math