#cognition

Enter every activity without giving mental recognition to the possibility of defeat. Concentrate on your strengths, instead of your weaknesses... on your powers, instead of your problems. ↗

— Paul J. Meyer

#concentrate #defeat #enter #every #giving

I think what you're seeing is a profound recognition on the part of the American people that gays and lesbians and transgender persons are our brothers, our sisters, our children, our cousins, our friends, our co-workers, and that they've got to be treated like every other American. And I think that principle will win out. ↗

— Barack Obama

#american people #brothers #children #co-workers #cousins

Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace. ↗

— George Santayana

#cannot #devour #eating #embrace #expect

Power must be used, but it must be tempered by soul-searching and the recognition of our human capacity for error. That is the maxim that should inform our approach to every challenge, from reforming state government to engaging in foreign affairs. ↗

— Eliot Spitzer

#approach #capacity #challenge #engaging #error

There are really two types of laughter on the part of the spectator. There is the laughter of recognition - which means seeing things you're familiar with and laughing at yourself. But there's also hysterical laughter - a way of dealing with the things we see that upset us. ↗

— Michael Haneke

#dealing #familiar #hysterical #laughing #laughter

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. ↗

— Friedrich von Hayek

#design

There is a sense in which all cognition can be said to be motivated. One is motivated to understand the world, to be in touch with reality, to remove doubt, etc. Alternately one might say that motivation is an aspect of cognition itself. Nevertheless, motives like wanting to find the truth, not wanting to be mistaken, etc., tend to align with epistemic goals in a way that many other commitments do not. As we have begun to see, all reasoning may be inextricable from emotion. But if a person's primary motivation in holding a belief is to hue to a positive state of mind, to mitigate feelings of anxiety, embarrassment, or guilt for instance. This is precisely what we mean by phrases like "wishful thinking", and "self-deception". Such a person will of necessity be less responsive to valid chains of evidence and argument that run counter to the beliefs he is seeking to maintain. To point out non-epistemic motives in an others view of the world, therefore, is always a criticism, as it serves to cast doubt on a persons connection to the world as it is. ↗

— Sam Harris

#emotion #morality #motivation #religion #motivational

There was something in her eyes that made me trust her. Maybe it was because they held the same cynicism, the same world-weariness I saw in my own every morning when I looked at myself in the mirror. ↗

— Melika Dannese Lux

#kindred-spirits #olga-belododia #partners #realization #recognition

Humans do not simply, innocently, and honestly disagree with each other about the good, the just, the right, the principles and applications of moral distinction and valuation, for they are already caught, like it or not, in a complex dynamic of each other’s desires, recognition, power, and comparisons which not only relativizes moral distinctions and valuations, but makes them a constant and dangerous source of discord. ↗

— Gregory B. Sadler

#desire #disagreements #moral-theory #morality #philosophy

But though cognition is not an element of mental action, nor even in any real sense of the word an aspect of it, the distinction of cognition and conation has if properly defined a definite value. ↗

— Samuel Alexander

#any #aspect #cognition #conation #defined