Rick Riordan Quotes

Some ways of using our thinking are really inspiring. There are people who use their thinking to race cars. People use their thinking to build rockets to the moon. It's all just a use of your thinking.

Simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.

Mathematical discoveries, small or great are never born of spontaneous generation.

Writing's a great skill, but thinking's a better one.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.

I like to figure things out and solve problems.

Maths should be more practical and more conceptual, but less mechanical.

Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.

Solving wits and puzzles, in a way, helps to develop wit and ingenuity.

The main functions of intelligence, that of inventing solutions and that of verifying them, do not necessarily involve one another. The first partakes of imagination; the second alone is properly logical.

On 'MythBusters,' a lot of what we do does not fall into any category of things we have ever done before. There's a lot of problem solving to figure out how to even approach a given problem. A background in science or engineering helps a lot.

Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn't always beat actual thought.

Mathematicians have a certain type of mind, and climbers have a certain type of mind, because climbing poses these incredibly interesting problems for them.

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.

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.

Teaching how to think is better than lecturing how to do it.

It's a simple exercise; a little logic, a little taste, and the will to cooperate.

Without analysis, no synthesis.

Successful people engage that creative part of their minds and ask, "Well, I wonder how else I can look at this problem? I wonder how else I could deal with this decision? I wonder what other possibilities I have there?"

Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new.

The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.

The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.

We thought all this teaching was to make us smart. What it did was make us stupid. With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think.

Botvinnik tried to take the mystery out of Chess, always relating it to situations in ordinary life. He used to call chess a typical inexact problem similar to those which people are always having to solve in everyday life.

It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical