Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Quotes

They are deceptively simple. I admit that. But for me, all my life I try to simplify things. As a child in school, things were very hard for me to understand often, and I developed a knack, I think. I developed a process to simplify things so I would understand them.

If you use your mind to study reality, you won't understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you'll understand both.

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

I'm a thinker.

I never overthink or overanalyze anything.

I'm not sure what theory is, unless it's the pursuit of fundamental questions.

I am not an intellectual. An intellectual is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso, whereas I just say 'pass the mustard'.

I possess a strong sense of reason.

You can teach students how to work; you can teach them technique - how to use reason; you can even give them a sense of proportions - of order. You can teach them general principles.

It is not merely that Johnny can't read, or even that Johnny can't think. Johnny doesn't know what thinking is, because thinking is so often confused with feeling. … The phrase ‘I feel’ is often used by American students to introduce a conclusion, rather than say ‘I think,’ or ‘I know,’ much less ‘I conclude.’ Unfortunately, ‘I feel’ is often the most accurate term…

If you're willing to put two thoughts into a picture then you're already ahead of the game.

Regardless of the magnitude of the decision, our brains make it hard for us to keep the perspective we need to make good choices.

The problem with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than their minds.

The world presents enough problems if you believe it to be a world of law and order; do not add to them by believing it to be a world of miracles.

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

I can usually find my own way out of whatever dicey literary or linguistic situations I wander into, but I have to work much harder at the science.

I always say I have a Socratic approach to most things that I do. I pummel people with questions, because I need to know what they're thinking, what they're trying to achieve, what they believe the final outcome is going to be.

It's actually very surprising how little we think about the quality of our decision-making and how we could improve it. How absent decision-making classes are from educational curricula. How little we think about how it is we think.

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.

The speculative part of my work is that these particular cognitive tasks - ways of thinking analytically - are tied to nature's laws.

A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street.

Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?

There is a dearth of thinking skills - people are taught what to think, not how.

The words printed here are concepts. You must go through the experiences.

If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.