Conceptual Understanding Quotes

For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.

I can explain how a person with autism thinks. I am very, very interested in how people think. It's been a gradual process of learning more and more about how my thinking process is different. You know it's bottom up - you take specific examples to make concepts and then I put them in categories.

Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not - in his mind - undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.

If you get into the mental habit of relating what you're reading to the basic structure of the underlying ideas being demonstrated, you gradually accumulate some wisdom.

The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language.

Learning consists of ideas, and not of the noise that is made by the mouth.

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.

Theory is the practice of the impotent.

Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.

After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense.

I have a 2-year-old son, and I know I'm dealing with a big, grand word when I can't point to the thing when I define it. Right? If he wants to know what a chair is, I can point to the chair. If he wants to know what religion is, I can't point to anything in particular. The same is true of the state.

My bag is approaching something and taking it to another place. Like words-you take a word and by the time you've finished with it, you milk it and you go through the emotion of what it is, what it means there and then.

The correct statement of the laws of physics involves some very unfamiliar ideas which require advanced mathematics for their description. Therefore, one needs a considerable amount of preparatory training even to learn what the words mean.

Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension.

I don't think it's physically possible for little kids to know what abstract thought is.

I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about.

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.

It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them.

There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call "atheists," and those who think they are facts are "religious." Which group really gets the message?

The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.

But in the new (math) approach, the important thing is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer.

one of the tests of a theory is that, once grasped, it appears self-evident.

The first step in wisdom is to know the things themselves; this notion consists in having a true idea of the objects; objects are distinguished and known by classifying them methodically and giving them appropriate names. Therefore, classification and name-giving will be the foundation of our science.

There are things which seem incredible to most men who have not studied Mathematics.

You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.