Quotes from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“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, quote from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor, just as we are good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs.”
― Maria Konnikova, quote from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“A change in perspective, in physical location, quite simply forces mindfulness. It forces us to reconsider the world, to look at things from a different angle. And sometimes that change in perspective can be the spark that makes a difficult decision manageable, or that engenders creativity where none existed before.”
― Maria Konnikova, quote from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“for every standard deviation increase in cloud cover on the day of the college visit, a student is 9 percent more likely to actually enroll in that college.”
― Maria Konnikova, quote from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“Our education might stop, if we so choose. Our brains’ never does. The brain will keep reacting to how we decide to use it. The difference is not whether or not we learn, but what and how we learn.”
― Maria Konnikova, quote from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“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, quote from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“A helpful exercise is to describe the situation from the beginning, either out loud or in writing, as if to a stranger who isn’t aware of any of the specifics—much like Holmes talks his theories through out loud to Watson. When Holmes states his observations in this way, gaps and inconsistencies that weren’t apparent before come to the surface.”
― Maria Konnikova, quote from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“every time you find yourself making a judgment immediately upon observing—in fact, even if you don’t think you are, and even if everything seems to make perfect sense—train yourself to stop and repeat: It is impossible as I state it, and therefore I must in some respect have stated it wrong. Then go back and restate it from the beginning and in a different fashion than you did the first time around. Out loud instead of silently. In writing instead of in your head. It will save you from many errors in perception.”
― Maria Konnikova, quote from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“a failure to use all senses equals a scene not seen to its full potential, attention that has not been allocated properly, and subconscious cues that color the attention that is allocated in a way that may not be optimal.”
― Maria Konnikova, quote from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“How did the System Holmes machine become . . . a System Watson? Simple. Holmes says it himself: he had lost interest in the case. In his mind, it was already solved, down to the last detail—the visit, of which he thought so much that he decided it would be fine to disengage from everything else. And that’s a mistake he doesn’t normally make.”
― Maria Konnikova, quote from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“It’s fun to home in on that incongruity”
― Maria Konnikova, quote from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“Why do we so often fail at this final stage of perception? The answer lies in that very element we were discussing: engagement.”
― Maria Konnikova, quote from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“the better they recalled the topics of conversation, the more extremely off their predictions were. In other words, the busier their brains were, the less they adjusted after forming an initial impression.”
― Maria Konnikova, quote from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“We want to learn to pay attention better, to become superior observers, but we can’t hope to achieve this if we thoughtlessly pay attention to everything. That’s self-defeating. What we need to do is allocate our attention mindfully”
― Maria Konnikova, quote from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“Whatever the situation, answering the question of what, specifically, you want to accomplish will put you well on your way to knowing how to maximize your limited attentional resources. It will help direct your mind, prime it, so to speak, with the goals and thoughts that are actually important—and help put those that aren’t into the background.”
― Maria Konnikova, quote from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“Absent Holmes, the Watson storytelling approach is the natural, instinctive one. And absent Holmes’s insistence, it is incredibly difficult to resist our desire to form narratives, to tell stories even if they may not be altogether correct, or correct at all. We like simplicity. We like concrete reasons. We like causes. We like things that make intuitive sense (even if that sense happens to be wrong).”
― Maria Konnikova, quote from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“That, in a nutshell, is the scientific method: understand and frame the problem; observe; hypothesize (or imagine); test and deduce; and repeat. To follow Sherlock Holmes is to learn to apply that same approach not just to external clues, but to your every thought—and then turn it around and apply it to the every thought of every other person who may be involved, step by painstaking step.”
― Maria Konnikova, quote from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“Holmes’s trick is to treat every thought, every experience, and every perception the way he would a pink elephant. In other words, begin with a healthy dose of skepticism instead of the credulity that is your mind’s natural state of being.”
― Maria Konnikova, quote from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“motivation predicts higher academic performance, fewer criminal convictions, and better employment outcomes. Children who have a so-called “rage to master”—a term coined by Ellen Winner to describe the intrinsic motivation to master a specific domain—are more likely to be successful in any number of endeavors, from art to science.”
― Maria Konnikova, quote from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

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“And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.”
― Hermann Hesse, quote from Siddhartha

“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube.”
― Ayn Rand, quote from Atlas Shrugged

“Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“And then Serafina understood something for which the witches had no word: it was the idea of pilgrimage. She understood why these beings would wait for thousands of years and travel vast distances in order to be close to something important, and how they would feel differently for the rest of time, having been briefly in its presence. That was how these creatures looked now, these beautiful pilgrims of rarefied light, standing around the girl with the dirty-face and the tartan skirt and the boy with the wounded hand who was frowning in his sleep.”
― Philip Pullman, quote from The Golden Compass

“An ordinary beginning, something that would have been forgotten had it been anyone but her. But as he shook her hand and met those striking emerald eyes, he knew before he'd taken his next breath that she was the one he could spend the rest of his life looking for but never find again. She seemed that good, that perfect, while a summer wind blew through the trees.”
― Nicholas Sparks, quote from The Notebook

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