Michel Foucault Quotes

What they can expect always is that they're going to be made to think.

The finest minds seem to be formed rather by efforts at original thinking, by endeavors to form new combinations, and to discover new truths, than by passively receiving the impressions of other men's ideas.

I am interested in evolution within my thinking. I am not interested in the evolution of my paint.

I always try and find new things to think about and address. That really opens you up as a writer. I can write a lot of what I feel and it helps put it into clearer perspective.

Learning can be a bridge between doing and thinking. But then there is a danger that the person who uses learning as a bridge between doing and thinking may get stuck in learning and never get on to thinking.

A university shouldn't be a place of comfort. It should be a place of discomfort because you want to disabuse these kids of whatever prejudices or preconceptions they have when they come. You're trying to get them to think and develop, not be a Johnny-one-note.

The human mind moves always forward, alters its viewpoint and enlarges its thought substance, and the effect of these changes is to render past systems of thinking obsolete or, when they are preserved, to extend, to modify and subtly or visibly to alter their value.

Everyone has to learn to think differently, bigger, to open to possibilities.

If you don't contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you're not thinking.

It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand?

The mind resorts to reason for want of training.

Information work is thinking work.

No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it.

The way of learning is none other than finding the lost mind.

... we must read, not only for what we read but for what it makes us think.

Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.

Think, the successful idea is always in your mind. Think it out.

You can lead a boy to college, but you cannot make him think.

One of the problems with watching TV is that you've got a fairly low level of language operating all the time. Quite a small vocabulary and really no conceptual or abstract thinking. That's an issue. If you've got a wide vocabulary, you can learn. The complexities of grammar, in themselves, force you to think about time in a particular way. Force you to widen your outlook on the world.

The mind is a product of experience. It is the result of past thinking and is modified by present thinking.

Some people are aware of another sort of thinking which... leads to those simple ideas that are obvious only after they have been thought of... the term 'lateral thinking' has been coined to describe this orther sort of thinking; 'vertical thinking' is used to denote the conventional logical process.

Care about understanding and before you know it, in just a few decades, you'll have a system of thinking that gives you answers whenever you ask.

Lateral thinking is concerned not with playing with the existing pieces but with seeking to change those very pieces. It is concerned with the perception part of thinking. This is where we organise the external world into the pieces we can then 'process'.

Education would be a divine thing, if it did nothing more than help us to think and love great thoughts instead of little thoughts.

It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not to fill the minds of students with facts... it is to teach them to think.