Maria Konnikova famous quotes

All too often, when it comes to our own minds, we are surprisingly mindless. We sail on, blithely unaware of how much we are missing, of how little we grasp of our own thought process - and how much better we could be if only we'd taken the time to understand and to reflect.
-- Maria Konnikova

#Taken #Missing #Mind

But when we observe, we are forced to pay attention. We have to move from passive absorption to active awareness. We have to engage.
-- Maria Konnikova

#Moving #Attention #Pay

the most powerful mind is the quiet mind. It is the mind that is present, reflective, mindful of its thoughts and its state. It doesn't often multitask, and when it does, it does so with a purpose.
-- Maria Konnikova

#Powerful #Mind #Doe

Holmes serves as an ideal model of how we can learn to see and think better.
-- Maria Konnikova

#Thinking #Awareness #Holmes

As children, we are remarkably aware. We absorb and process information at a speed that we'll never again come close to achieving... we are learning about our world and its possibilities.
-- Maria Konnikova

#Children #Our World #Information

Looking at scenes of nature, for even a short while, can help us become more insightful, more creative, and more productive.
-- Maria Konnikova

#Nature #Creative #Insightful

How many thoughts float in and out of your head without your stopping to identify them? How many ideas and insights have escaped because you forgot to pay attention?
-- Maria Konnikova

#Ideas #Stopping #Attention

When we are forced to do multiple things at once, not only do we perform worse on all of them but our memory decreases and our general well-being suffers a palpable hit.
-- Maria Konnikova

#Memories #Stress #Suffering

Imagination is all about new possibilities, eventualities that don't exist, counterfactuals, a recombination of elements in new ways. It is about the untested. And the untested is uncertain. It is frightening-even
-- Maria Konnikova

#Imagination #Elements #Way

Thats a wonderful change thats taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.

Producing a photographic document involves preparation in excess. There is first the examination of the idea of the project. Then the visits to the scene, the casual conversations, and more formal interviews - talking, and listening, and looking, looking. ... And finally, the pictures themselves, each one planned, talked, taken and examined in terms of the whole.

Do not be fooled by your youthful appearance for very soon it would be taken away from you.

First steps are always the hardest but until they are taken the notion of progress remains only a notion and not an achievement.

It was one thing to hide away from the world. It was quite another to discover the world didn't miss you when you were gone.

Lest Arab governments be tempted out of sheer routine to rush into impulsive rejection, let me suggest that tragedy is not what men suffer but what they miss.

Sometimes she wished for someone she could tell about her problems, just to be able to say, ‘I’m in love with a man and I can’t have him.’ But that would only lead to questions she couldn’t answer, so she kept the secret and the pain inside, hoping someday she would no longer feel as if half of her were missing.

Sometimes the course of our lives depends on what we do or don't do in a few seconds, a heartbeat, when we either seize the opportunity, or just miss it. Miss the moment and you never get a chance again.

The university is our culture's assertion that what is made by the mind has value and can convey values.

The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind.