Assumptions Quotes

Just remember: If you make unfounded assumptions before choosing a path, you’re blindly sauntering along.

There is no hatred as corrupting as intellectual hatred.

It's always your assumptions about you, about others, about future that make reality worse than it actually is.

I find myself constantly taking apart be taken-for-granted.

The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.

Positive assumptions are needed only when you have negative assumptions that you’re trying to overcome. But when you drop your assumptions altogether, your soul stands naked in the open fields of possibility. And what you choose to create from that space is up to you.

It had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had brought away no smell of scorching. We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own ease, link us indissolubly with the established order.

One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.

Listen with an open mind, gather all the incoming information, both verbal and non-verbal and be careful not to ignore things you don’t wish to hear. Don’t make assumptions or jump to conclusions. The punchline usually comes at the end!

Most of us make assumptions about how someone will relate to us, and they are often unfounded.

All she captures is a moment and what she calls it is a memory,Sometimes, it is assumptions that we use; all we need is a theory,Because you don’t know what is there in the future,And all you need is a vision to make a perfect picture.I feel that I have known you for a century,And whatever she calls is a memory.

Learning to be aware of what you unconsciously know may depend on a line of focused effort and specialized knowledge and even some measure of aptitude, but actually learning it may be effortless, automatic, and require very little of what we normally think of as intelligence.

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.

Perhaps, if you weren't so busy regarding my shortcomings, you'd find that I do possess redeeming qualities, discreet as they may be.  I notice when the sky is blue.  I smile down at children.  I laugh at any innocent attempt at humor.  I quietly carry the burdens of others as though they were my own.  And I say 'I'm sorry' when you don't.  I am not without fault, but I am not without goodness either.

Character displays "the weighty impatience of having to explain something that should already be understood.

Leaders live by reality and not by assumptions!

TR on using extramarital accusations against Wilson: "It won't work. You can't cast a man as Romeo who looks and acts like an apothecary's clerk.

Familiarity can provide the misguided illusion of understanding. Assume nothing.

When we heed God's Word, we are rejecting how the world tries to disciple us.

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

True masters deconstruct as well as reconstruct.

Words in the head are sticky and social creatures – when you finally pull one out, you're liable to get lots of bits of meanings that have rubbed onto them as a result of their palling around with other words.

Never judge a woman by her age.

Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.

I’ve always been under the assumption that death is a one-time, encompassing event.” “Why would you ever think that?

That's the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.

Thou shalt make no image, no abstraction, including none of THE American, THE Swiss, THE German.

People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.

Goldwater hardly ever mentioned a statistic. He hardly ever used it EXAMPLE. He presumed you already knew what he meant. Reagan SHOWED you.

We do not realize how deeply our starting assumptions affect the way we go about looking for and interpreting the data we collect. We should recognize that nonhuman organisms need not meet every new definition of human language, tool use, mind, or consciousness in order to have versions of their own that are worthy of serious study. We have set ourselves too much apart, grasping for definitions that will distinguish man from all other life on the planet. We must rejoin the great stream of life from whence we arose and strive to see within it the seeds of all we are and all we may become.

Be careful of what you assume, what you assume often becomes what you consume

A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality

If you are going to judge others it is wisest to do so individually not collectively and on your own direct experience of them personally. But first - and throughout - examine yourself closely. Blurred vision can often occur due to the lens, perspective and perceptions of the viewer projected onto the object that it sees. Be wary of taking to the judges seat. Above all meet at treat yourself and everyone else mindfully, compassionately with humanity.

Often she felt as though she had been picked up and turned about like a kaleidoscope, that all her complacent assumptions had been shaken up and reassembled in a different order

I say, sir, that you can never make an intelligent judgment without evidence.

You will make a perfectly rational mistake: You will assume that sooner or later the paradigm you are presently practicing (which has been mostly successful) will solve all the rest of your problems.

The greatest difficulty in antiquity with that of altering the law; among the moderns, it is that of altering the manners.

There is nothing so expensive, really, as a big, well-developed, full-bodied preconception.

It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities. The theologians, taking one with another, are adept logicians, but every now and then they have to resort to sophistries so obvious that their whole case takes on an air of the ridiculous. Even the most logical religion starts out with patently false assumptions. It is often argued in support of this or that one that men are so devoted to it that they are willing to die for it. That, of course, is as silly as the Santa Claus proof. Other men are just as devoted to manifestly false religions, and just as willing to die for them. Every theologian spends a large part of his time and energy trying to prove that religions for which multitudes of honest men have fought and died are false, wicked, and against God.

The author says that one of the difficulties of modern parenting is the uncertainty of what parents are preparing children for. In traditional societies this was clear, as parents prepared children for a society and for roles much like their own. She writes, "There is no folk wisdom.

Intelligence people are no different from anybody else. They have preconceptions, and when they see them in real life, it reinforces how brilliant they think they are.

A written constitution is needed to protect values AGAINST prevailing wisdom.

I suppose that one of my greatest problem lays in the fact that I have assumed a blessing to be something that is mine for the taking, verses being something that by sheer exposure to it takes me.

Sex education in the modern manner has been well-described as plumbing for hedonists.

Even when alternative views are clearly wrong, being exposed to them still expands our creative potential. In a way, the power of dissent is the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer, we work to understand it, which causes us to reassess our initial assumptions and try out new perspectives. “Authentic dissent can be difficult, but it’s always invigorating,” [Charlan] Nemeth [a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley] says. “It wakes us right up.

They have the unique ability to listen to one story and understand another.

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

Drop all those assumptions that success is built on success. Add a very little value to yourself and it will amaze you how you will see people appreciate that value!

I am not convinced within myself that to its core and as a whole, humanity has, as some like to assume, progressed a great deal over the millennia. Human technology? Of course. Human beings? Hardly.

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.

Study the assumptions behind your actions. Then study the assumptions behind your assumptions.

Do you really understand all this army stuff?It helps not to be too bright, sir.

The road itself tells us far more than signs do.

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

(A middle-class child's) parents didn't just give him money. They passed down habits, knowledge, and cognitive traits.

Vigilance of the wisest kind is to incessantly remain open to the reality that what I ‘see’ is but a single thread and solitary shard of what ‘is’, for to assume otherwise is to surrender the wisdom of vigilance to the decay of ignorance.

It makes Brooke feel strange in her stomach. It is like the feeling when she reads a book like the one about the man with the bomb, or thinks a sentence, just any old sentence like: the girl ran across the park, and unless you add the describing word then the man or the girl are definitely not black, they are white, even though no one has mentioned white, like when you take the the out of a headline and people just assume it's there anyway. Though if it were a sentence about Brooke herself you'd have to add the equivalent describing word and that's how you'd know. The black girl ran across the park.

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government.

It was easier to come to maturity when there were more well-defined philosophical options.

Under the absolute sway of an individual despot the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul, and the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose superior to the attempt; but such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.