Douglas Hofstadter Quotes

Everything hangs on one's thinking.

Most men seem to live according to sense rather than reason.

To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Logic doesn't apply to the real world. D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (eds.) The Mind's I, 1981.

This then is the age of reason.

You don't want to know the Truth, you want to know the truth as you understand it. This is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment. You think you already know the truth! You think you already understand how it is. So you agree with everything you see or hear or read that falls into the paradigm of your understanding, and reject everything which does not.

Thinking does not lead to truth; truth is the beginning of thought.

A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence.

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.

Everything that happens is at least one dimension smaller than you've imagined it to be.

I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.

To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing).

Every human being relies on and is bounded by his knowledge and experience to live. This is what we call “reality”. However, knowledge and experience are ambiguous, thus reality can become illusion. Is it not possible to think that, all human beings are living in their assumptions?

The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies "out there" in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.

I don't think the world objectively exists the way we think it exists. There's a constant sort of storytelling process.

Einstein says common sense is just habit of thought. It's how we're used to thinking about things, but a lot of the time it just gets in the way.

When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.

Philosophy is an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously.

Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.

Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder.

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.

It is however always important to remember that the ability to see things in their correct perspective may be, and often is, divorced from the ability to reason correctly and vice versa. That is why a man may be a very good theorist and yet talk absolute nonsense.

Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that's performing the logic.