Tom G. Palmer Quotes

A research problem is not solved by apparatus; it is solved in a man's head.

They are deceptively simple. I admit that. But for me, all my life I try to simplify things. As a child in school, things were very hard for me to understand often, and I developed a knack, I think. I developed a process to simplify things so I would understand them.

I always like to think on a problem before reading about it.

One cannot with impunity try to transfer this task entirely to mechanical assistants if one wishes to figure something, even though the final result is often small indeed.

Thinking is one of the most important weapons in dealing with problems

Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

Thinking. A process by which I use my brain to make a rational decision.

Knowing how to think empowers you far beyond those who know only what to think.

Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.

Then you have a big problem, because a human is a thinking animal. If you don't think, you're not really a human.

Information cannot serve as an effective substitute for thinking.

As soon as you externalize an idea you see facets of it that weren't clear when it was just floating around in your head.

Think. That's what we need you to do. Think.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems

The entire method consists in the order and arrangement of the things to which the mind's eye must turn so that we can discover some truth.

I think everyone should get a little exposure to computer science because it really forces you to think in a slightly different way, and it's a skill that you can apply in life in general, whether you end up in computer science or not.

Reason and the ability to use it are two separate skills.

In order to begin an analysis, there must already be a synthesis present in the mind.

The analytical power should not be confounded with simple ingenuity; for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis.

What is thinking? It is the activity of searching out what must be true, or cannot be true, in the light of the given facts or assumptions.

Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not - in his mind - undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.

'The scientific method,' Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, 'is nothing but the normal working of the human mind.' That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes.

It is commonplace that a problem stated is well on its way to solution, for statement of the nature of a problem signifies that the underlying quality is being transformed into determinate distinctions of terms and relations or has become an object of articulate thought.

Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.

The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.