Stanislaw Jerzy Lec Quotes

Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the way the car is driven.

I need something, Wax. A place to look. You always did the thinking.” “Yes, having a brain helps with that, surprisingly.

From now on you're going to have to think. There's a reason why we're born with brains in our heads, not rocks.

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

Common sense is calculation applied to life.

The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.

Logic can become enormously difficult, and it would undoubtedly be well to produce more assurance in its use.

The most valuable real estate in the world lies between the president's ears.

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

Intelligence is an extremely subtle concept. It's a kind of understanding that flourishes if it's combined with a good memory, but exists anyway even in the absence of good memory. It's the ability to draw consequences from causes, to make correct inferences, to foresee what might be the result, to work out logical problems, to be reasonable, rational, to have the ability to understand the solution from perhaps insufficient information. You know when a person is intelligent, but you can be easily fooled if you are not yourself intelligent.

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well.

It doesn't matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.

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

There are those who reason well, but they are greatly outnumbered by those who reason badly.

People who think well, write well

Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.

The concept of logical thinking is selection and this is brought about by the processes of acceptance and rejection. Rejection is the basis of logical thinking.

Mechanical rules are never a substitute for clarity of thought.

Thinking is one of the most important weapons in dealing with problems

Do you have a brain? Then you can think your way out of it. The reason we have brains is so we can figure out how to do things.

Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does.

We seem to have trouble with [critical thinking]. And our political system doesn't help.

I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it's like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.

Critiquing relieves you of the responsibility of doing integrative thinking.

I can put two and two together, you know. Do not think you are dealing with a man who has lost his grapes.