127 Quotes About Cognition

But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan.

Lingering, bottled-up anger never reveals the 'true colors' of an individual. It, on the contrary, becomes all mixed up, rotten, confused, forms a highly combustible, chemical compound then explodes as something foreign, something very different than one's natural self.

All there is to thinking, he said, is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren't noticing which makes you see something that isn't even visible.

As historical texts become rich and conceptually dense, readers may slow down not because they fail to comprehend, but because the very act of comprehension demands that they stop to TALK with their texts. In plain English, they pretend to deliberate with others by talking to themselves.

Magical thinking is the brain's way of handling complexity and, judging by the survival or humankind, it has done a pretty good job.

Thinking isn't something you do. Most of the time, it's something that happens to you.

There seems to be an important relationship between language and thought: I often speak—or write, as I am doing right now—to define or refine my thinking on a particular topic, and language is the scaffolding by which I arrive at my more subtle or syncretic thoughts.

Nightmares are seldom a foreshadowing of real events, but always a showing of real fears.

Space places two fundamental constraints on movement, constraints that are reflected in thought: proximity--near places are easier to get to than far ones; and gravity--going up is more effortful than going down.