Michel de Montaigne Quotes

I don't make decisions with my heart, I use my brain to think things through.

To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active.

My definition of an educated man is the fellow who knows the right thing to do at the time it has to be done. You can be sincere and still be stupid.

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

Scientia is knowledge. It is only in the popular mind that it is equated with facts.

The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.

In complex trains of thought signs are indispensable.

Logic obviously is important. You need to be able to figure things out, to go to the end of a particular problem. But intuition is very important because it references things that logic alone cannot.

There is a dearth of thinking skills - people are taught what to think, not how.

I don't analyze things like titles.

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

A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.

There is always a multitude of reasons both in favor of doing a thing and against doing it. The art of debate lies in presenting them; the art of life lies in neglecting ninety-nine hundredths of them.

Knowledge is justified belief.

The real question, therefore, is not whether students should be taught to think critically and self-reflectively, but instead what they should be thinking critically about.

It's just human nature to try and figure things out. So, when we're in the midst of a situation, we usually try to reason our way through it.

People are born with the ability to make judgments. And they can't help but use the information they have to divine something about the world they're in. Making categorical judgments, in large, helps our society.

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.

Italians think with their heads.

WHAT a person thinks is determined by HOW a person thinks.

Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgement, the manner in which information is coordinated and used.

These two rational faculties may be designated the Scientific Faculty and the Calculative Faculty respectively; since calculation is the same as deliberation, and deliberation is never exercised about things that are invariable, so that the Calculative Faculty is a separate part of the rational half of the soul.

There are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.

So we do sometimes think because it has been found to pay.