Norton Juster Quotes

Thinking isn't something you think about. It comes naturally. Thinking involves many things. It involves being an observer. It involves analyzing things, taking in what's around you in the world and finding how to make it inspire your work or turn it into a lesson to teach your children; it's paying attention to details. That's what thinking is: processing.

In order to begin an analysis, there must already be a synthesis present in the mind.

Most of us seldom take the trouble to think. It is a troublesome and fatiguing process and often leads to uncomfortable conclusions. But crises and deadlocks when they occur have at least this advantage, that they force us to think.

To solve a problem it is necessary to think. It is necessary to think even to decide what facts to collect.

Then you have a big problem, because a human is a thinking animal. If you don't think, you're not really a human.

When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, "Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure."

Holmes serves as an ideal model of how we can learn to see and think better.

Think. That's what we need you to do. Think.

The entire method consists in the order and arrangement of the things to which the mind's eye must turn so that we can discover some truth.

What is thinking? It is the activity of searching out what must be true, or cannot be true, in the light of the given facts or assumptions.

C'mon kid. Think a minute, even if it hurts.

Thinking. A process by which I use my brain to make a rational decision.

We are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them.

Always it is thus with my new students, and especially with the human ones; the mind is the last muscle they train or use, and the one that they regard the least. Ask them about swordplay and they can list every blow from a duel a month old, but ask them to solve a problem or make a coherent statement and... well, I would be lucky to get more than a blank stare in return.

Informing people about the world's problems opens up the possibility to address them and change them. Anything else is simply willful ignorance. I mean, what the hell should we do? Sit around blowing up balloons? Watching Disney-sponsored movies? I don't think so.

Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress.

Thinking. This book contains some. Whether you try it at home is up to you.

I wish people would quit telling me to think. I think. Thinking's easy. It's not thinking that's hard.

Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only rarely a true assumption because, most often, the critic will seize on some little aspect that he or she understands and tackle only that.

If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack.

First Sight means you can see what really is there, and Second Thoughts mean thinking about what you are thinking. And in Tiffany's case, there were sometimes Third Thoughts and Fourth Thoughts although these...sometimes led her to walk into doors.

Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected.

Analysis and synthesis are both as necessary to the thinking spirit as inspiration and expiration to the organism.

Thinking is the most overrated human activity.