Cognitive Evaluation Quotes

I got good grades in school, but I'm not sure if I'm smart or if it just means I can study. I've never taken one of those IQ tests, and I don't want to. It's so pointless. As long as you enjoy life and have fun and you're healthy and happy, that's what matters.

We don't ruminate during a fight. Maybe in a bath, or driving a car, or as we take a walk. But not right smack in the middle of a dramatic moment.

A rational man is guided by his thinking - by a process of Reason - not by his feelings and desires.

It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another...we consider those, where the intellectual faculties most developed as the highest. - A bee doubtless would [use] ... instincts as a criteria.

There is an unusually high and consistent correlation between the stupidity of a given person and that person’s propensity to be impressed by the measurement of IQ.

I have come to this conclusion: if 'sentimentality' is lazy emotion, then the term itself is lazy criticism.

I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.

Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn't always beat actual thought.

The repudiation of the primacy of understanding means the repudiation of the norms of judgment as well, and hence the abandonment of all ethical standards.

I engage my subjects in conversation, patterned after psychiatric questioning, with the aim of discovering something about the reasoning underlying their right but especially their wrong answers.

I just want people to hold themselves to account about what they think more, because I strongly believe that the way to live a moral life is to not allow yourself to have beliefs which are easy but which don't make sense.

So through identification you have pleasure and pain.

No official yet born on this earth is wise enough or generous enough to separate good ideas from bad ideas, good beliefs from bad.

There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness

I have always wanted to be a man, if only for the reason that I would like to have gauged the value of my intellect.

Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only rarely a true assumption because, most often, the critic will seize on some little aspect that he or she understands and tackle only that.

One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.

I used to hold a unitary view, in which I proposed that only experienced happiness matters, and that life satisfaction is a fallible estimate of true happiness.

Reason is universal because no attempted challenge to its results can avoid appealing to reason in the end-by claiming, for example, that what was presented as an argument is really a rationalization. This can undermine our confidence in the original method or practice only by giving us reasons to believe something else, so that finally we have to think about the arguments to make up our minds.

People not only gain understanding through reflection, they evaluate and alter their own thinking.

There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same.

It's not that the creative act and the critical act are simultaneous. It's more like you blurt something out and then analyze it.

We're not accustomed to judging things on philosophical importance.

When you're being asked to think about the meaning of your intuitions before you act on them, maybe along the way you decide your intuitions are destructive or make no sense at all. And then you don't act on them.

When we look at external things, we can usually distinguish those that are useful and valuable from those that are not. We must learn to look at our mind in the same way.