Wolfgang Ernst Pauli Quotes

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

We have associations to things. We have, you know, we have associations to tables and to - and to dogs and to cats and to Harvard professors, and that's the way the mind works. It's an association machine.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking.

All ideas come about through some sort of observation. It sparks an attitude; some object or emotion causes a reaction in the other person.

An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.

Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts.

A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

Ideas are information taking shape.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling before it is an idea, and every idea rests upon other ideas that have preceded it in time.

Rain on my head, call that brainstorming.

An idea is a feat of association.

Everything hangs on one's thinking.

I don't carry notebooks and I don't consciously store ideas. I try not to think that I am a writer and I am pretty good at doing that. I don't like writers, but then I don't like insurance salesmen either.

Ideas result from the collision of metaphors inside the head.

We think in language. The quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language.

Sometimes people feel mind is merely the - in some animal, the energy or something from the brain. Now there are little sort of curiosities or I think doubt sometimes a sheer sort of mental attitude, some change in our brain. So these fields, now scientists are showing some interest.

To have ideas is to gather flowers; to think is to weave them into garlands.

If you remember only one thing I've said, remember that an idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor. If you have never made a good metaphor, then you don't know what it's all about.

Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.

As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there. So rather than correct the weird ideas, I would rather them to know how to think in the first place. Then they can correct the weird idea themselves.

This London City, with all of its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic an tumult, what is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One-a huge immeasurable Spirit of a Thought, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest of it! Not a brick was made but some man had to think of the making of that brick.

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

I am beginning to understand the true difference between youth and age. Young people have time to make plans and think of new ideas. Older people need their whole energy to keep up with what’s already been set in motion.