Joseph de Maistre Quotes

I'd be wary of simple solutions to complex problems.

The more complex the world situation becomes, the more scientific and rational analysis you have to have, the less you can do with simple good will and sentiment.

The best way to view a present problem is to give it all you've got, to study it and its nature, to perceive within it the intrinsic interrelationships, to discover the answer to the problem within the problem itself.

To understand a difficult topic like Iraq takes patience and care. Unfortunately, you rarely hear a patient, careful or thoughtful discussion of intelligence these days.

One of the exciting things about an entanglement puzzle is there's no end to it. Once you solve how to take it apart, you have to solve how to put it back together.

I like thinking and being able to answer questions that are tough to answer. You have to try to figure out how to get a good answer and look intelligent.

The simple questions are always the hardest ones.

Thinking rationally is often different from "positive thinking," in that it is a realistic assessment of the situation, with a view towards rectifying the problem if possible.

I don't guess. I think. I ponder. I deduce. Then I decide. But I never guess.

Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. ...Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.

It often happens that I have an idea, but then I try to fill in the intermediate steps and find they don't work, so I have to give it up.

Excelling at chess has long been considered a symbol of more general intelligence. That is an incorrect assumption in my view, as pleasant as it might be.

It's strange how few of the world's great problems are solved by people who remember their algebra.

We fail when we try to give simple answers to complicated problems.

He that gives a portion of his time and talent to the investigation of mathematical truth, will come to all other questions with a decided advantage over his opponents.

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

Of course, analysis can sometimes give more accurate results than intuition but usually it’s just a lot of work. I normally do what my intuition tells me to do. Most of the time spent thinking is just to double-check.

Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried.

Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created

Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.

With thought, all problems can be resolved.

Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only rarely a true assumption because, most often, the critic will seize on some little aspect that he or she understands and tackle only that.

If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society... It is the education which gives a man a clear, conscious view of their own opinions and judgements, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought to detect what is sophistical and to discard what is irrelevant.

Those who will not reason, perish in the act. Those who will not act, perish for that reason.

Mathematics is not just a language. Mathematics is a language plus reasoning.