Siri Hustvedt Quotes

Thinking - in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature - helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.

We've taught you that the earth is round, That red and white make pink, And something else that matters more - We've taught you how to think.

Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.

I realized that, to a large degree, I had kept my rational mind at bay my whole life. I just acted on intuition in terms of how I related to life. At some point, my rational mind started creeping in, and it would not shut up. I finally had to address it and confront it. I think most intelligent people, at a younger age than I have, begin to question some of the fundamental assumptions our society promotes. But me, I just rejected it without even considering it.

The study of science teaches young men to think, while study of the classics teaches them to express thought.

College totally changed my life. It changed what I believe and what I think about everything. I majored in philosophy.

I preferred the weapons of dialectic to all the other teachings of philosophy, and armed with these, I chose the conflicts of disputation rather than the trophies of war.

School gives you the freedom to explore different philosophies, religions, aspects of yourself, and subjects.

The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.

Only as an individual can man become a philosopher.

My mother cared more about how you reasoned than about the conclusions you reached.

Lastly, literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist.

The finest minds seem to be formed rather by efforts at original thinking, by endeavors to form new combinations, and to discover new truths, than by passively receiving the impressions of other men's ideas.

Philosophy teaches you to think big.

The first thing you get from the humanities, when they're well taught, is critical thinking. Philosophy in particular can play that role, not just in universities but in schools as well.

I think philosophy is extremely good training for anyone who wants to do anything. Although that is an idea which people may speak scornfully of now, I think it does teach one to

I believe in the religion of reason -- the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world.

I think that great programming is not all that dissimilar to great art. Once you start thinking in concepts of programming it makes you a better person...as does learning a foreign language, as does learning math, as does learning how to read.

I'm disturbed when people let superstition, magical thinking, extreme conspiracy theories and so on blur their minds.

The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think

An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking.

When you are forced to think, you expand your mental capacity. When you expand your mental capacity, your wealth increases.

Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.

Philosophy is "an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.

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.