Analytical Mindset Quotes

I became, in other words, more like Holmes than the man himself: brilliant, driven to a point of obsession, careless of myself, mindless of others, but without the passion and the deep-down, inbred love for the good in humanity that was the basis of his entire career. He loved the humanity that could not understand or fully accept him; I, in the midst of the same human race, became a thinking machine.

I realized that, to a large degree, I had kept my rational mind at bay my whole life. I just acted on intuition in terms of how I related to life. At some point, my rational mind started creeping in, and it would not shut up. I finally had to address it and confront it. I think most intelligent people, at a younger age than I have, begin to question some of the fundamental assumptions our society promotes. But me, I just rejected it without even considering it.

I don't consider myself a cynic. I think of myself as a skeptic and a realist.

Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough.

Cynics criticize and winners analyze.

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.

A desperation to escape a problem is the wrong way. A passion to understand it is the right way

You need to have a passionate interest in why things are happening. That cast of mind, kept over long periods, gradually improves your ability to focus on reality. If you don't have the cast of mind, you're destined for failure even if you have a high I.Q.

Read like a detective and write like a conscientious investigative reporter.

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

A cheap and easy cynicism rails at everything. The master of the art accomplishes the formidable task of discrimination.

I teach people to be flexible, scientific and logical in their thinking and therefore to be less prone to brainwashing by the therapist.

There is coming an era for people with a mathematical state of mind

My skepticism is strong, but my curiosity is stronger.

Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication, and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us --- and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along.

Skepticism is not a position; it's a process.

An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.

I don't want them to believe me, I just want them to think.

He read a lot. He used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.

I don't look at a problem and put variables in there that don't affect it.

The mind should be accustomed to make wise reflections, and draw curious conclusions as it goes along; the habitude of which made Pliny the Younger affirm that he never read book so bad but he drew some profit from it.

Skepticism does not preserve us from foolhardy deeds.

Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.

I am skeptical in principle, gullible in practice.

...even professors of economics, to say nothing of the public, do not generally have scientific minds.