Quotes & Sayings About Flexible Thinking

Children who are encouraged to play with the same object in a number of different ways develop the kind of flexible thinking that can consider a problem from a number of different perspectives. — Jack Petrash

Besides, you're going to need all your strength tonight. I have many wicked plans for you."
"Good." Mac smiled up at her, pressing a kiss to the back of her hand. "Think we'll make it as far as the bedroom this time?"
"I was thinking the kitchen counter, but I'm flexible... — Courtney Hunt

We humans have a wide range of abilities that help us perceive and analyze mathematical content. We perceive abstract notions not just through seeing but also by hearing, by feeling, by our sense of body motion and position. Our geometric and spatial skills are highly trainable, just as in other high-performance activities. In mathematics we can use the modules of our minds in flexible ways - even metaphorically. A whole-mind approach to mathematical thinking is vastly more effective than the common approach that manipulates only symbols. — William Thurston

Think about the photo you want to make beforehand. Then do it, but also don't be blind to better options that present themselves at the location. Be flexible, and be patient. Leave ego at home. Get the photo before you yell at the asshole, not after. — Peter Menzel

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. — Neal Stephenson

I just think it's ridiculous to be dogmatic and be caught in the past. You have to be open, aware, nimble and flexible about changes in the world. — Joseph McGinty Nichol

A flexible mind has a better chance to think differently and take a unique path in the life journey. — Pearl Zhu

If corporations started thinking in terms of social norms, they would realize that these norms build loyalty and-more important-make people want to extend themselves to the degree that corporations need today: to be flexible, concerned, and willing to pitch in. That's what a social relationship delivers. — Dan Ariely

They'd scared me and had me thinking about what it meant to be really strong, on my own terms - not just fit and brown from the sun, not just flexible and accommodating. — Paula McLain

I think you have to be flexible above all as an actor; different characters have different demands, actors that you work with are different in their approach, or how you get along or don't get along with them. — Viggo Mortensen

When you're angry, you can't fight rationally. Your body chemistry is all messed up. Your energy goes to all the wrong places. You can't do anything well except get angrier. That's why I like fighting guys who are pumped up on steroids. Fighting is all about relaxing and releasing tension, so your body is flexible and fluid, able to bend and flex quickly, like water. I like fighting angry guys who are really tense. They can't think right, and they can't fight right. — Frank Shamrock

Dulles was fortunate to find someone like Mary, a woman whose morals were conveniently flexible - or, as she herself put it, a woman with a "sophisticated point of view." She had a curious way of explaining her moral dexterity, but Dulles certainly would have endorsed her way of thinking. "In order to engage in intelligence work successfully," Mary observed, "it was essential to have a very clear-cut idea of your own moral values, so that if you were forced by necessity to break them, you were fully conscious of what you were doing and why. — David Talbot

It's hard to stay flexible if you don't stretch. I think if you train the right way you'll be flexible. There are people that don't appreciate the value of stretching. I think it's very important. — Darren Shahlavi

I think it's very important to distinguish between objectivity - which tends to be open, flexible, skeptical of its own certainty and open to new information - and objectivism - which thinks, "No, we know it all, we've got it, so real thinking and learning can come to an end." — W. J. T. Mitchell

It's easy to get stuck thinking one particular way. And a lot of times it's even good to be rooted in your beliefs. But every once in a while someone comes along and blows everything you ever thought to be true right out of the water. Sometimes it's more important to be flexible than right. — Rachel Higginson

Not being tense but ready.
Not thinking but not dreaming.
Not being set but flexible.
Liberation from the uneasy sense of confinement.
It is being wholly and quietly alive, aware and alert, ready for whatever may come. — Bruce Lee

Do not be tense, just be ready, not thinking but not dreaming, not being set but being flexible. — Bruce Lee

Mind is a flexible mirror, adjust it, to see a better world. — Amit Ray

There's a fine line in being too specific so you can't be too flexible, and being too vague in being specific and people not thinking it's meaningful. — Jim Nussle

If you are in an improv jazz ensemble or a small chamber group, you learn to think fast on your feet and how to be flexible and to collaborate and compromise, and that may yield a creative outcome. — J. Richard Hackman

Assessing the mind of a creature this alien demands that we be extraordinary flexible in our own thinking. Marine biologist James Wood suggests our hubris gets in our way. — Sy Montgomery

Ensure that both plan and dispositions are flexible, adaptable to circumstances. Your plan should foresee and provide for a next step in case of success or failure. — B.H. Liddell Hart

I think we're entering a new period of filmmaking that's analogous to switching from black-and-white to color, or from silent to sound. The medium is completely flexible, and it's not bound by anything. If you imagine something, you can do it. — Jean-Pierre Jeunet

If we start worrying whether our nose is too big or too small, we should think, "What if I had no head? - now that would be a problem!" As long as we have life, we should rejoice. If everything doesn't go exactly as we'd like, we can accept it. If we contemplate impermanence deeply, patience and compassion will arise. We will hold less to the apparent truth of our experience, and the mind will become more flexible. Realizing that one day this body will be buried or burned, we will rejoice in every moment we have rather than make ourselves or others unhappy. — Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche

When people try to use religion to address the natural world, science pushes back on it, and religion has to accommodate the results. Beliefs can be permanent, but beliefs can also be flexible. Personally, if I find out my belief is wrong, I change my mind. I think that's a good way to live. — Lisa Randall

Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages. — Eric S. Raymond

Science, as I pointed out in the previous chapter, is flexible and nondogmatic. It sticks to facts and to reality (which always can change) and to logical thinking (which does not contradict itself and hold two opposite views at the same time). But it also avoids rigid all-or-none and either/or thinking and sees that reality is often two sided and includes contradictory events and characteristics. Thus, in my relations with you, I am not a totally good person or a bad person but a person who sometimes treats you well and sometimes treats you badly. Instead of viewing world events in a rigid, absolute way, science assumes that such events, and especially human affairs, usually follow the laws of probability. — Albert Ellis

I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes. — Karen Russell

The next time you pick up a camera think of it not as an inflexible and automated robot, but as a flexible instrument which you must understand to properly use. An electronic and optical miracle creates nothing on its own! Whatever beauty and excitement it can represent exist in your mind and spirit to begin with. — Ansel Adams

The documentary style is an incredibly flexible and useful one. It's a wonderful tool for establishing the credibility of the version of things that's in the photograph - a kind of rhetorical device or rhetorical strategy. It's always felt very natural to me, because I want a person to end up thinking about the world, and to think about it in a way that is transformed by the experience of art. — Frank Gohlke

Rescuers tended to be decisive, fast-thinking, risk-taking, independent, adventurous, openhearted, rebellious, and unusually flexible - able to switch plans, abandon habits, or change ingrained routines at a moment's notice. They tended to be nonconformists, and though many rescuers held solemn principles worth dying for, they didn't regard themselves as heroic. — Diane Ackerman

Her mind moved around and around the subject, moving with a kind of fuzzy firmness. With no coherent thought process, she arrived at a conviction - a habit with the basically insecure; an insecurity whose seeds are invariably planted earlier, in under or over-protectiveness, in a distrust in parental authority which becomes all authority. It can later, with maturity - a flexible concept - be laughed away, dispelled by determined clear thinking. Or it can be encouraged by self-abusive resentment and brooding self-pity. It can grow ever greater until the original authority becomes intolerable, and a change becomes imperative. Not to a radical one in thinking; that would be too troublesome, too painful. The change is simply to authority in another guise which, in time, and under any great stress, must be distrusted and resented even more than the first. — Jim Thompson

I honestly think vulnerability is a beautiful thing: it's tenderness, authenticity, and risk-taking. It means you're living a life where the stakes are high and you are continuing to push your own boundaries and learn new things. It keeps you flexible and young. — Jaime Murray

The more flexible we become in our thinking and being, the more we open ourselves to self-awareness & growth. — James Van Praagh