Inflexible Thinking Quotes

Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon.

Dogma is invariably wrong, as knowledge is always in a state of transition.

It's so easy to be boxed into one part and one part only.

It must be noted that it is often the colleague or direct disciple of a new thinker who gets stuck in literal interpretations of the work, tending to freeze the new ideas and language into an inflexible, static condition.

Hate is a lack of imagination.

Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.

There are three musts that hold us back: "I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy." And I sometimes think that as long as we keep the second must, which is socially learned, then some screwballs 100 years from now will manufacture atomic bombs in their bathtub and maybe annihilate the whole human race because they demand that the rest of the world must agree with their dogmas. When we don't agree, they may zap us.

Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of 'I know.' Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas.

But intolerant,narrow minds with no imagination are like parasites that transform the host,change form,and continue to thrive. They're a lost cause, and I don't want anyone like that coming in here.

There are minds constructed like the eyes of certain insects, which discern, with admirable distinctness, the most delicate lineaments and finest veins of the leaf which bears them, but are totally unable to take in the ensemble of the plant or shrub. When error has effected an entrance into such minds, it remains there impregnable, because no general view assists them in throwing off the chance impression of the moment.

Consistency is the quality of a stagnant mind.

Psychosclerosis: the hardening of the attitude which causes a person to cease dreaming, seeing, thinking, and leading.

When knowledge becomes rigid, it stops living.

We see that pedantry has never been held in such esteem for the government of the world as in our times, and it offers as many paths of the true intelligible species and objects of infallible and sole truth as there are individual pedants.

Any alternative culture that inspires a lot of passion and inspiration is also in danger of being set in its ways, almost from the moment it's born.

That's why I hate the outlines and treatments, because all you get are cliches. If you put things down on paper as your plan, it's very hard to get those ideas out of your head and do something better.

When you strive for perfection, you compare different versions of what could be instead of being present with what is. Perfectionism is an attempt to inhabit an imaginary world in order to avoid experiencing the world in which you live.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

Firmness or stiffness of the mind is not from adherence to truth, but submission to prejudice.

From the very beginning, when you go into Scientology your world narrows down very quickly.

What happens is that you discover you're carrying so much weight that 90 percent of what you thought yesterday you are thinking about today and will think about again tomorrow. Your mind doesn't change because you are carrying too large a load. So the mind is caught. It's seized by its own structures. It can't consider different ways of thinking or doing or being or relating. It's all you can do with your psychic energy to keep pulling yourself along with this huge bag that you are dragging behind you.

having considerable mind, changing it became almost as ponderous an operation as moving a barn, although not nearly so stable.