Quotes & Sayings About Conceptual Thinking

A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming. — Alan Perlis

Space is a unifying field of awareness in which you meet the other person without the separative barriers created by conceptual thinking. And now the other person is no longer 'other.' In that space, you are joined together as one awareness, one consciousness. — Eckhart Tolle

Words are a distraction to enlightenment. Getting rid of conceptual thinking means enlightenment. — Ramesh S Balsekar

I've been an advocate against the view of the writer as a partitioned genius hanging in conceptual space, or up on a mountain, a bringer of Promethean fire, some unique transmission that comes out of nowhere. I prefer the opposite view - that writers come from somewhere. They read things, and they think about them, and they incorporate other people's thoughts. — Jonathan Lethem

All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

The best you can do as a parent is to expose your children to a wide range of religions. Rather than trying to "program them" to dislike religion, give them the tools to analyze it themselves. With the conceptual tools of critical thinking and skepticism, and adequate exposure to many religions, children are very likely eventually to conclude that all religion is crazy. — Darrel Ray

The cultural and political backgrounds of the two sides diverge in important aspects. The American approach to policy is pragmatic; China's is conceptual. America has never had a powerful threatening neighbor; China has never been without a powerful adversary on its borders. Americans hold that every problem has a solution; Chinese think that each solution is an admission ticket to a new set of problems. Americans seek an outcome responding to immediate circumstances; Chinese concentrate on evolutionary change. Americans outline an agenda of practical "deliverable" items; Chinese set out general principles and analyze where they will lead. Chinese thinking is shaped in part by Communism but embraces a traditionally Chinese way of thought to an increasing extent; neither is intuitively familiar to Americans. China — Henry Kissinger

When students learn to wrestle with questions about purpose, audience, and genre, they develop a conceptual view of writing that has lifelong usefulness in any communicative context. — John C. Bean

Another reason we know that language could not determine thought is that when a language isn't up to the conceptual demands of its speakers, they don't scratch their heads dumbfounded (at least not for long); they simply change the language. They stretch it with metaphors and metonyms, borrow words and phrases from other languages, or coin new slang and jargon. (When you think about it, how else could it be? If people had trouble thinking without language, where would their language have come from-a committee of Martians?) Unstoppable change is the great given in linguistics, which is not why linguists roll their eyes at common claims such as that German is the optimal language of science, that only French allows for truly logical expression, and that indigenous languages are not appropriate for the modern world. As Ray Harlow put it, it's like saying, Computers were not discussed in Old English; therefore computers cannot be discussed in Modern English. — Steven Pinker

I rummage around in artistic things from the past. If you don't understand the context, they wouldn't make any sense. I rummage around in conceptual ideas of the future, but if you don't know the source of the thinking, [it] wouldn't make any sense. — Billy Corgan

Aristotle declared that, 'It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.' Does the intrinsic tension between opposing ideas create a lamplight of stereoscopic vision? Does the mental friction generated by antinomy, a contradiction between two apparently equally valid principles or between inferences correctly drawn from such principles, lead to war within the mind or does the natural rasping of abrasive thoughts spur the mind to create soothing metaphorical thoughts in order to attain conceptual peace? — Kilroy J. Oldster

Many philosophers in the second half of the 20th century really seemed to think that they were laying the foundations for science by laying down the conceptual (necessary) truths. — Patricia Churchland

Sex is probably one of the last forms of human expression to enjoy such a direct connection with nature. It might be the primary site of conflict between nature and culture. If one assumes that nature (or instinct) is repressed in a highly civilised society, then I think the conceptual dyad nature-culture is best preserved there, in the realm of sex. — Thomas Koerfer

The mind we have when we practice zazen is the great mind: we don't try to see anything; we stop conceptual thinking; we stop emotional activity; we just sit. Whatever happens to us, we are not bothered. We just sit. It is like something happening in the great sky. Whatever kind of bird flies through it, the sky doesn't care. That is the mind transmitted from Buddha to us. — Shunryu Suzuki

I am good in the fact that most of my reviews have been very positive really. I get pretty good reviews. There have been some that aren't - critical. I think they are extremely - the people that wrote them really don't understand what they are looking at quite frankly or have a very preconceived notion of what conceptual art should be or where I am at or the fact that I may change what I have done from what I did 20 years ago. But there is always some reason that they just sort of get it wrong. And so it certainly doesn't affect my work. — Robert Barry

To share out your soul freely, that is what metanoia (a change of mind, or repentance)really refers to: a mental product of love. A change of mind, or love for the undemonstrable. And you throw off every conceptual cloak of self-defense, you give up the fleshly resistance of your ego. Repentance has nothing to do with self-regarding sorrow for legal transgressions. It is an ecstatic erotic self-emptying. A change of mind about the mode of thinking and being. — Christos Yannaras

I think the term 'conceptual art' is a useful term for writers, a basket to put people in, like Pop Art or Impressionism or whatever. — John Baldessari

What is the conceptual tie that binds anxiety and planning? Both, of course, are intimately connected to thinking about the future. — Daniel M. Gilbert

That we are rational agents - that a great many of our actions are not merely the results of serial physiological urges but are instead dictated by coherent conceptual connections and private deliberations - is one of those primordial data I mentioned above that cannot be reduced to some set of purely mechanical functions without producing nonsense. That a number of cognitive scientists should be exerting themselves to tear down the Cartesian partition between body and soul, hoping to demonstrate that there is no Wonderful Wizard on the other side pulling the levers, is poignant proof that our mechanistic paradigms trap much of our thinking about mind and body within an absurd dilemma: we must believe either in a ghost mysteriously animating a machine or in a machine miraculously generating a ghost. Premodern thought allowed for a far less restricted range of conceptual possibilities. — David Bentley Hart

Thinking fragments reality - it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces. — Eckhart Tolle

I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about. — Andrew Wiles

I have an unusual type of thinking. I have no visual memory whatsoever. Everything is conceptual to me. — Craig Venter

Since substance is infinite, the universe as a whole, i.e., god, Hegel is telling us that philosophy is knowledge of the infinite, of the universe as a whole, i.e, god. You cannot get more metaphysical than that. I think that Hegel scholars have to admit this basic fact rather than burying their heads in the sand and trying to pretend that Hegel is concerned with conceptual analysis, category theory, normativity or some such contemporary fad. — Frederick C. Beiser

I rather incline towards 'conceptualism', in line with my view of colour perception - I don't think that we can represent objects and properties for which we have no concepts, not even in perceptual experience. In this sense I differ from those who defend 'non-conceptual content' like Michael Tye and Chris Peacocke. — David Papineau

Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in a scientifically literate democracy, and even suggests a statement of purpose for it (a surprisingly elusive principle in higher education today). The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world. And education is likely to succeed not by trying to implant abstract statements in empty minds but by taking the mental models that are our standard equipment, applying them to new subjects in selective analogies, and assembling them into new and more sophisticated combinations. — Steven Pinker

Understanding is very different from knowing. Understanding is a psychological process of perceiving an object through reason. It is, in a sense, conceptualizing an object. But an object cannot be fully comprehended by conceptual understanding alone. Knowing is not thinking artificially or mobilizing rational logic. It is a state in which you come to obviously and plainly know, without trying to get it right. — Ilchi Lee

Conceptual Design If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking of solutions. - Albert Einstein — Victor Sower

The intellectual ethic of a technology is rarely recognized by its inventors. They are usually so intent on solving a particular problem or untangling some thorny scientific or engineering dilemma that they don't see the broader implications of their work. The users of the technology are also usually oblivious to its ethic. They, too, are concerned with the practical benefits they gain from employing the tool. Our ancestors didn't develop or use maps in order to enhance their capacity for conceptual thinking or to bring the world's hidden structures to light. Nor did they manufacture mechanical clocks to spur the adoption of a more scientific mode of thinking. These were by-products of the technologies. But what by-products! Ultimately, it's an invention's intellectual work ethic that has the most profound effect on us. — Nicholas Carr

I think Bitcoin is a massive conceptual and helpful step forward. — Godfrey Bloom

In order to understand why one chooses to be a Tantric practitioner, there has to be an understanding of cause and effect, cyclic existence, the awareness that the reality that we think we are seeing is not reality as it really truly is. So enlightenment is seeing reality with bare awareness, non-conceptual reality. — Zeena Schreck

I'm not anti conceptual art. I don't think painting must be revived, exactly. Art reflects life, and our lives are full of algorithms, so a lot of people are going to want to make art that's like an algorithm. But my language is painting, and painting is the opposite of that. There's something primal about it. It's innate, the need to make marks. That's why, when you're a child, you scribble. — Jenny Saville

To experience anything fully and see it clearly there must be a moment of presence where conceptual thinking is not interfering with your experience of that moment. — Eckhart Tolle

The idea is to help patients more clearly assess the contents of their thought stream, teaching them to note and correct the conceptual errors termed "cognitive distortions" that characterize psychopathological thinking. Somone in the grips of such thinking would, for instance, regard a half-full glass not merely as half-empty but also fatally flawed, forever useless, constitutionally incapable of ever being full, and fit only to be discarded. By the mid-1980s, cognitive therapy was being used more and more in combination with behavioral therapy for OCD, and it seemed naturally compatible with a mindfulness-based perspective. If I could show that a cognitive-behavioral approach, infused with mindful awareness, could be marshaled against the disease, and if successful therapy were accompanied by changes in brain activity, then it would represent a significant step toward demonstrating the causal efficacy of mental activity on neural circuits. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

To have Zen is to be in a state of pure sensation. It is to be freed from the grip of concepts, to see through them. This is not the same as rejecting conceptual thinking. Thoughts and words are in the world and are as natural as flowers. It is a mistake therefore to think that Zen is anti-intellectual. — Alan Keightley

One of the problems with watching TV is that you've got a fairly low level of language operating all the time. Quite a small vocabulary and really no conceptual or abstract thinking. That's an issue. If you've got a wide vocabulary, you can learn. The complexities of grammar, in themselves, force you to think about time in a particular way. Force you to widen your outlook on the world. — Jeanette Winterson

I'm capable offstage of having some dark, twisted thoughts but the kind of things I like to do onstage are just more conceptual and I don't even think of them as being clean. I don't sit down and think, "Man, I'm going to come up with some lily-white comedy!" They're just things that I like to talk about, and then at the end of the day you think, "Well, I guess that was clean" but it's not the focus. — Brian Regan

I started philosophy looking for answers. But along the way I came to prize exploring the questions. Progress in philosophy consists, I think, in a clearer delineation of the conceptual options, not in reaching determinate conclusions. — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Thinking scientifically requires the ability to reason abstractly, which itself is at the foundation of all morality. Consider the mental rotation required to implement the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This necessitates one to change positions - to become the other - and then to extrapolate what action X would feel like as the receiver instead of the doer (or as the victim instead of the perpetrator). A case can be made that the type of conceptual ratiocination required for both scientific and moral reasoning not only is linked historically and psychologically, but also that it has been improving over time as we become better at nonconcrete, theoretical reflection. — Michael Shermer

Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics;we adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged. — Willard Van Orman Quine

If you want to get an interesting perspective do not think of Hugh as a traditional 20th century physicist but more of a Renaissance man with interests and skills in many different areas. He was smart and lots of things interested him and he brought the same general conceptual methodology to solve them. The subject matter was not so important as the solution ideas. — Hugh Everett III

I do tend to look at my books in many ways as conceptual fiction, even to the point where I think the author's photograph is part of the package. And I have gone out of my way to select the photograph to connect to the subject matter of each book. — Bret Easton Ellis

Uniquely specific, direct, non-linguistic experience is the element in which we live, and it is radically different from conceptual thinking, which can go on only in universals. This is why works of art, embodying as they do unique particulars and insights that cannot be conveyed in words, and cannot be mirrored in conceptual thought, have their roots in lived life and also cannot be translated [into words]. It is why, if someone responds to art predominantly with his intellect, he has already misunderstood it. — Bryan Magee

I think what they've been doing is largely almost in firefighting mode without a good conceptual framework - either at the micro or the macro level. Micro, you would ask: "What kind of financial or banking system do we want?" Macro, you would say: "What are the underlying problems in the structure of our economy?" — Joseph Stiglitz

The acquisition of knowledge from books provides an experience different from the Internet. Reading is relatively time-consuming; to ease the process, style is important. Because it is not possible to read all books on a given subject, much less the totality of books, or to organize easily everything one has read, learning from books places a premium on conceptual thinking - the ability to recognize comparable data and events and project patterns into the future. And style propels the reader into a relationship with the author, or with the subject matter, by fusing substance and aesthetics. — Henry Kissinger

People who look at art don't really - don't go with the artist. They don't sort of accept what he or she has done and kind of go with it. There are always - either there's too much color or not enough color, either it's not conceptual enough or it's too conceptual. In other words, most criticism isn't what the viewer expected that it would do based on what they think you have done and that's good as far as I'm concerned. — Robert Barry

I didn't want to be criticized for taking low-quality photographs, so I tried to reach the best, highest quality of photography and then to combine this with a conceptual art practice. But thinking back, that was the wrong decision [laughs]. Developing a low-quality aesthetic is a sign of serious fine art-I still see this. — Hiroshi Sugimoto

When you continuously know and sense yourself as the space of consciousness rather than what appears in consciousness - sense perceptions, thoughts, emotions - then it can be said that you are enlightened ... except that you wouldn't think or speak of yourself as 'enlightened', because that would instantly create another mind-based conceptual identity and so it would be the end of 'your' enlightenment. — Eckhart Tolle

Consciousness, which is the "reflective" element of Norman's conceptual brain, handles the "higher" functions at the metaphorical tip of the very top of that complicated organ. Because consciousness pays a lot of attention to your thoughts, you tend to identify it with cognition. However, if you try to figure out exactly how you run your business or care for your family, you soon realize that you can't grasp that process just by thinking about it. As Norman puts it, "Consciousness also has a qualitative, sensory feel. If I say, 'I'm afraid,' it's not just my mind talking. My stomach also knots up. — Winifred Gallagher