Quotes with preconceptions

I think there's a difference between (a) offending people for its own sake, which I don't necessarily want to do, because some people are good and decent and it would be unkind to upset them simply to indulge my own self-importance, and (b) challenging their prejudices, their preconceptions, or their comfortable assumptions. I'm very happy to do that. But we need to be on our guard when people say they're offended. No one actually has the right to go through life without being offended. Some people think they can say "such-and-such offends me" and that will stop the "offensive" words or behaviour and force the "offender" to apologise. I'm very much against that tactic. No one should be able to shut down discussion by making their feelings more important than the search for truth. If such people are offended, they should put up with it.

An outree explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less excentric.

Most people have this tendency to make judgments on others based on preconceptions, especially when they are dealing with them for the first time.

Do not limit yourself to your own preconceptions of yourself, but throw yourself out onto a blank page that you haven't written on yet, and see what you find out about you, see what story unfolds, see what happens! I always do this, and sometimes it can be very frightening! To very often have a blank page with nothing written on it yet! I feel as though I am a soul with a single covering–my body of skin– and that's the only thing between me on the inside and the rest of the world! It's quite frightening to begin each day on a blank page, forgetting your own preconceptions of yourself and allowing your mind to embrace the new! It is like meeting yourself for the first time, over and over again!

Human beings are not nearly as coolly rational as we like to think we are. Having set up comfortable planets of belief, we become resistant to altering them, and develop cognitive biases that prevent us from seeing the world with perfect clarity. We aspire to be perfect Bayesian abductors, impartially reasoning to the best explanation - but most often we take new data and squeeze it to fit with our preconceptions.

The act of true reading is in its very essence democratic. Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book - and I mean, of course, a work of literature, not an instruction manual or a textbook - in private, unsupervised, un-spied-on, alone. It isn't like a lecture: it's like a conversation. There's a back-and-forthness about it. The book proposes, the reader questions, the book responds, the reader considers. We bring our own preconceptions and expectations, our own intellectual qualities, and our limitations, too, our own previous experiences of reading, our own temperament, our own hopes and fears, our own personality to the encounter.

Elizabeth's whole style of rule was pragmatic and free from preconceptions. It was not that she had no strategic aims, but they were broad and simple. God had entrusted her with three things: a realm to defend; a church to lead in the true way; and a people to protect, both against foreign enemies and against themselves.

She had called herself a whore. That was a man's word, a shame-word flung at a woman. But she did not seem ashamed. She wielded the word like a sword, slicing away all his preconceptions of who she was. She had earned her living by her sex, and she did not seem to regret it.

To one degree or another we all fight against preconceptions nearly every day. The wisest people I know don't compare their fight to that of others. Everything is relative through the lens of personal struggle.Heroes come in all shapes and sizes... mine are often those who are fighting their fight in public. Unashamed. Proud. An example.Heroes aren't perfect. They have faults and flaws. They stumble from time to time. They are heroes, though, because they correct themselves... and set an example, intended or not, for the world observing them... even, and especially, to those who would love nothing more than to see them fail.Stay Strong!

Intellectually, what is stimulating to a young man is a problem of obvious practical importance. A young man learning economics, for example, ought to hear lectures from individualists and socialists, protectionists and free-traders, inflationists and believers in the gold standard. He ought to be encouraged to read the best books of the various schools, as recommended by those who believe in them. This would teach him to weigh arguments and evidence, to know that no pinion is certainly right, and to judge men by their quality rather than by their consonance with preconceptions.

Zen has been called the "religion before religion," which is to say that anyone can practice, including those committed to another faith. And that phrase evokes that natural religion of our early childhood, when heaven and a splendorous earth were one. But soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, at the bottom of each breath, there is a hollow place filled with longing. We become seekers without knowing that we seek, and at first, we long for something "greater" than ourselves, something apart and far away. It is not a return to childhood, for childhood is not a truly enlightened state. Yet to seek one's own true nature is "a way to lead you to your long lost home." To practice Zen means to realize one's existence moment after moment, rather than letting life unravel in regret of the past and daydreaming of the future. To "rest in the present" is a state of magical simplicity...out of the emptiness can come a true insight into our natural harmony all creation. To travel this path, one need not be a 'Zen Buddhist', which is only another idea to be discarded like 'enlightenment,' and like 'the Buddha' and like 'God.

By shattering my preconceptions and cultural stereotypes, what materialized was a massive personality who was astonishingly winsome yet gravely terrifying. A man whose breathtaking compassion would draw you in, but whose ferocious honesty could cut and slice like a razor. Someone who was the most controversial, confrontational, divisive, yet compellingly beautiful man who has ever lived. Which is precisely what we would expect if the Creator of the universe happened to invade our world.

People believed what made them comfortable. What fit with their preconceptions of how the world worked.