Kathryn Lasky Quotes

Being exposed to theory, stimulated by a basic love of concepts and mathematics, was a marvelous experience.

My mother cared more about how you reasoned than about the conclusions you reached.

Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.

Thinking has to be learned in the way dancing has to be learned.

I think you have to be left-brained, to a certain extent, to understand science. I can talk about it, but I can't do it.

And as to the faculties of the mind, setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon generall, and infallible rules, called Science; which very few have, and but in few things; as being not a native faculty, born within us; nor attained, (as Prudence,) while we look after somewhat else.

I think, though, that we need to be armed with the critical thinking skills that lawyers and scientists and journalists such as yourself have. We all need to have those as we make our way through the day. And they're not that hard to acquire.

Learn to use your brain power. Critical thinking is the key to creative problem solving in business.

There is no study in the world which brings into more harmonious action all the faculties of the mind than [mathematics], ... or, like this, seems to raise them, by successive steps of initiation, to higher and higher states of conscious intellectual being.

Mathematics ... is indispensable as an intellectual technique. In many subjects, to think at all is to think like a mathematician.

The broader the chess player you are, the easier it is to be competitive, and the same seems to be true of mathematics - if you can find links between different branches of mathematics, it can help you resolve problems. In both mathematics and chess, you study existing theory and use that to go forward.

The problems of puzzles are very near the problems of life.

You must acquire something of that industrious habit of mind which the study of natural science gives,—the art of comparing, of perceiving true likenesses and true differences, and so of classifying and arranging what you see; the art of connecting facts together in your mind in cause and effect

The importance of all education lies far more in the training of minds than in any facts which may be absorbed, for trained minds will ascertain the facts as they need to know them. Having learned to reason and to weigh the information they discover, people with such minds will be more nearly educated than any amount of cramming of definite facts into their heads will make them.

What is mathematics? It is only a systematic effort of solving puzzles posed by nature.

I think that great programming is not all that dissimilar to great art. Once you start thinking in concepts of programming it makes you a better person...as does learning a foreign language, as does learning math, as does learning how to read.

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.

Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.

We've taught you that the earth is round, That red and white make pink, And something else that matters more - We've taught you how to think.

The math helps you have better understanding and helps you have more creative ideas, but you can't replace the creative ideas

I think that it's important for people to read philosophy and literature is not because I think everyone should be a well-rounded human being, but because it will help you think better about what you are doing.

Games sometimes require lateral thinking. They sometimes require quite skilled hand-eye coordination and so on. But they're not in any sense intelligent in the way that you want your children to develop intelligence to make the mind not just supple, but actually informed.

If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

It's strange how few of the world's great problems are solved by people who remember their algebra.

Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.