How to Think More Effectively Quotes

“We all have very similar and very able minds; where geniuses differ is in their more robust inclinations to study them properly.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“It is only, proposed Montaigne, an intimidating scholarly culture that has made us doubt the rich insights of our own minds.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“The thought is not easy. We are educated to associate virtue with submission to authorities rather than with an exploration of the volumes daily transcribed within ourselves by our perceptual mechanisms. Montaigne tried to return us to ourselves. We know how to say, ‘This is what Cicero said’; ‘This is morality for Plato’; ‘These are the ipsissima verba of Aristotle.’ But what have we got to say? What judgements do we make? What are we doing? A parrot could talk as well as we do.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“what really counts is having the right plans to work from in the first place.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“concepts. We”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“we are each of us like a fountain, configured out of diverse, separate impulses, desires, attitudes and concerns that from a distance (seen by another person) give off an impression of being unified and coherent.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“Once we start to read the book, the benefit to our own train of thought continues. We’re used to imagining that it’s the ideas explicitly stated in a book that will enrich us, but we may not need the full thoughts of another person to come to a better sense of what we ourselves believe. Often, just a few paragraphs or even parts of sentences can be sufficient to provoke our minds and can nudge us to stop, daydream and reach for a notebook in which we jot down not the thought that we’ve read but the thought that it prompted inside us, which might be quite different and more significant. The book frames the topic for us; it puts the right question to us; it functions as the three dots that start us off … and we do the rest.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“if everything is doomed to end in the grave, then it might not matter overly if we were to approach an attractive stranger and be rebuffed, or if we tried our hand at a new task and discovered that we had no talent. While the thought of death may be terrifying, its inevitability might also usher in a feeling of fruitful experimentation.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity