Analytic Thinking Quotes & Sayings

This society [Jesuits] has been a greater calamity to mankind than the French Revolution, or Napoleon's despotism or ideology. It has obstructed the progress of reformation and the improvement of the human mind in society much longer and more fatally.

{Letter to Thomas Jefferson, November 4, 1816. Adams wrote an anonymous 4 volume work on the destructive history of the Jesuits} — John Adams

I'm just enjoying playing baseball in the major leagues. — Matt Holliday

Dancing is spiritual. Dancing is personal. Some people look at a dancing person and say, What a total show-off. They only notice the body of the dancing person. They look at the way the elbows jut out, the way the hips shake and the neck bends. They criticize all of these things, saying, This dancing person shouldn't be dancing. This dancing person has no rhythm.
But the dancer is immune to all of this. — Will Walton

Literature destabilizes thought by breaking open language and smuggling in sound, rhythm, and image--an invasion of aesthetics. More easily than analytic writing, poetry can emancipate itself from the standard definitions of words, enabling a breakthrough to new (and perhaps wayward or even nonsensical) meaning, which can then develop after the fact--different at each new reading. Literary language is presumptuous. It dips into the unknown in order to get nearer to a truth different from that of the superficially visible. As the poet Franz Josef Czernin described it, it is as though one step after another into emptiness could become a ladder. Literary writing can take the writers themselves by surprise; it can disturb and disappoint them--for stirring up turmoil is inherent in metaphor. Thus with every flash of understanding that comes from hearing or reading a poem, the fundamental work of thinking is taken up anew. — Marie Luise Knott

He gave me a small, secretive smile, a smile that said he knew many things but couldn't share them all at once. — David Benioff

The only thing you can be is yourself nothing more nothing less — Terry Goodkind

Both religiousness and lawlessness share the same problems: overconfidence and unrighteousness. "Why do bad things happen to good people?" we might ask - the very question that betrays our misplaced assumption that we somehow deserve a good life. — Tim Chaddick

'You might think of combinatorics as a machine too', the major says. 'A different sort of machine, though. Have you heard of Babbage's analytic engine? He never built it ... I have an analytic machine of my own-right here.' He taps his own skull. — David Leavitt

I think I have enough tattoos for now. If I get any others, I'll probably do my kids initials. — Niki Taylor

It is our knowledge - the things we are sure of - that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning. — Lincoln Steffens

To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world? — Virginia Woolf

To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached. — Neil Postman

more than parents. For most of the history of the human race, children have learned culture from the adults. That's why childhood and adolescence have to last so long in our species. But in the United States today, kids no longer learn culture from the grown-ups. American kids today have their own culture, a culture of disrespect, which they learn from their peers and which they teach to their peers. — Leonard Sax

In your 20's and 30's, you worry about what other people think. In your 40's and 50's you stop worrying about what other people think. Finally in your 60's and 70's, you realize they were never thinking about you in the first place! — Anonymous

Will you wait for me on the platform then?'
Suki looked at Rollo and cast her eyes upward. 'I suppose so.'
Retra smiled at her. 'Don't you mean, "I guess so"? — Marianne De Pierres

[Concerning] the usual contempt with which an orthodox analytic group treats all outsiders and strangers ... I urge you to think of the young psychoanalysts as your colleagues, collaborators and partners and not as spies, traitors and wayward children. You can never develop a science that way, only an orthodox church. — Abraham Maslow

We must become what we wish to teach. — Nathaniel Branden

Teachers, parents and school administrators: Today's teachers can create a Planet of Peace. The communication process you will learn by reading Nonviolent Communication is the cornerstone. — Robert Muller