Steve Allen Quotes

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.

Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.

All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.

There is a world of difference between a person who has a big problem and a person who makes a problem big.

What if the way we perceive a problem is already part of the problem?

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.

Problems are rarely as bad as we think-or rather, they are precisely as bad as we think.

All problems are illusions of the mind.

As you inquire into issues and turn judgments around, you come to see that every perceived problem appearing "out there" is really nothing more than a misperception within your own thinking.

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.

Metaphor is one of a group of problem-solving medicines known as figures of speech which are normally used to treat literal thinking and other diseases.

We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past.

If people don't think they have the power to solve their problems, they won't even think about how to solve them.

Rationality is the master lifehack which distinguishes which other lifehacks to use.

The Here-and-Now demands attention, is more present to us. We dismiss the inner world of our ideas as less important, although most of our immediate physical reality originated only in the mind. The TV, sofa, clock and room, the whole civilisation that contains them once were nothing save ideas.

When you're a hammer (as the saying goes), all your problems look like nails. If you're a meteorite expert pondering the sudden extinction of boatloads of species, you'll want to say an impact did it. If you're an igneous petrologist, volcanoes did it. If you're into spaceborne bioclouds, an interstellar virus did it. If you're a hypernova expert, gamma rays did it.

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

We make our own world by the way in which we think; for we really do live in a world of our own thoughts.

There is no order of things except in the human mind.

You are a great problem-creator. Just understand this and suddenly problems disappear.

To someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

The world is not a problem; the problem is your unawareness.

The thinking person has the strange characteristic to like to create a fantasy in the place of the unsolved problem, a fantasy that stays with the person even when the problem has been solved and truth made its appearance.

What we experience is our own concept of things. That is why no two people see quite the same world, and why, in many cases, different people see such different worlds. To put it another way, we make our own world by the way in which we think; for we really do live in a world of our own thoughts.