Your brain is most intelligent when you don’t instruct it on what to do — something people who take showers discover on occasion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Preludes” (2010)
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Quotations about:
intuition
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Often an idea about it would occur to me which seemed to have force and make perfect answer to some of the things that were said and written about my actions. I never let one of those ideas escape me, but wrote it on a scrap of paper and put it in that drawer. In that way I saved my best thoughts on the subject, and, you know, such things often come in a kind of intuitive way more clearly than if one were to sit down and deliberately reason them out.
To save the results of such mental action is true intellectual economy. It not only saves time and labor, but also the very best material the mind can supply for unexpected emergencies.Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) American lawyer, politician, US President (1861–65)
Remark (1863) to James F. Wilson (Attributed)
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Recounted in an essay (1896-12), "Some Memories of Lincoln," North American Review, Vol. 163, No. 481. Wilson references the remarks as having been made in late 1863, 33 years earlier.
Wilson was at the time a US Representative from Iowa (1861–1869); he went on to be US Senator (1883-1895). He had offered praise to a letter Lincoln had written (1862-06-13) to organizers of a public meeting which had criticized his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and subsequent arrests. Lincoln described how the letter had come from a collection of ideas he had put aside in a drawer as he considered the question.
A variant of this was given in Henry Llewellyn Williams (ed.), Lincolnics: Familiar Sayings of Abraham Lincoln (1906), noted as "Lincoln to Senator Wilson, 1862."I never let any idea escape me, but write it on a scrap of paper, and put it in a drawer. In that way I save my best thoughts on a subject, and such things often come in a kind of intuitive way more clearly than if one were to sit down and deliberately reason them out. To save the results of such mental action is true intellectual economy. It not only saves time and labor, but also the very best material the mind can supply for unexpected emergencies.
