Top 61 Jonah Lehrer Quotes
#1. Jonah Lehrer is one of the most talented explainers of science that we've got. What a pleasure it is to follow his investigation of creativity and its sources. Imagine is his best book yet.
Joshua Foer
#2. I'll be selling tickets for my next tour exclusively through Jonah Lehrer. Make sure to pay cash.
Bob Dylan
#3. Any real Bob Dylan fan would sleep with Jonah Lehrer.
Bob Dylan
#4. I'm a good friend of Jonah Lehrer's. You should go on a date with him.
Bob Dylan
#5. You want to know about creativity? Just go out and buy that book Imagine by Jonah Lehrer. It's only $29.00 in hardcover.
Bob Dylan
#6. As long as you give my friend Jonah Lehrer a free pizza, I'll write a song about your restaurant.
Bob Dylan
#7. The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours,' [T.S.] Eliot wrote. 'But less talent was wasted.
Jonah Lehrer
#8. We need to be willing to risk embarrassment, ask silly questions, surround ourselves with people who don't know what we're talking about. We need to leave behind the safety of our expertise.
Jonah Lehrer
#9. There simply is no way to describe the past without lying. Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction.
Jonah Lehrer
#10. I want to give people theories, I want to expose them to scientific stories that force them to re-evaluate the way they use these three pounds of meat inside their head.
Jonah Lehrer
#11. The world is more random than we can imagine. That's what our emotions can't understand.
Jonah Lehrer
#12. We are the poem, his poem says, that emerges from the unity of the body and the mind. That fragile unity
this brief parenthesis of being
is all we have. Celebrate it.
Jonah Lehrer
#13. Like a work of art, we exceed our materials. Science needs art to frame the mystery, but art needs science so that not everything is a mystery. Neither truth alone is our solution, for our reality exists in plural
Jonah Lehrer
#14. Rejection process is not fun. It's the red pen on the page, the discarded sketch, sometimes is the only way forward.
Jonah Lehrer
#15. A lie told well is just as good as the truth.
Jonah Lehrer
#16. Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true.
Jonah Lehrer
#17. Every creative journey begins with a problem. It starts with a feeling of frustration, the dull ache of not being able to find the answer. We have worked hard, but we've hit the wall. We have no idea what to do next.
Jonah Lehrer
#18. I always wanted to be a scientist, I always thought I'd be a scientist, that was the narrative I was carrying around. I worked in a neuroscience lab as an undergraduate and then after, almost five years in total, but I realized I just wasn't good at science. I didn't have the discipline for it.
Jonah Lehrer
#19. Distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything.
Jonah Lehrer
#20. By the age of 3, children from wealthier households hear, on average, about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. The ratio is reversed in households on welfare.
Jonah Lehrer
#21. The one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know.
Jonah Lehrer
#22. We see them most when we are o nnthe outside looking in
Jonah Lehrer
#23. Insights, after all, come from the overlap between seemingly unrelated thoughts. They emerge when concepts are transposed, when the rules of one place are shifted to a new domain.
Jonah Lehrer
#24. Knowledge can be a subtle curse. When we learn about the world, we also learn all the reasons why the world cannot be changed. We get used to our failures and imperfections. We become numb to the possibilities of something new
Jonah Lehrer
#25. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.
From Imagine: How Creativity Works pg 23 (hardcover)
Jonah Lehrer
#26. People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.
Jonah Lehrer
#27. Three individuals form a partnership and agree to divide the
profits equally. X invests $9,000, Y invests $7,000, Z invests
$4,000. If the profits are $4,800, how much less does X receive
than if the profits were divided in proportion to the amount invested?
Jonah Lehrer
#28. Love is just another name for what never gets old.
Jonah Lehrer
#29. If our DNA has a literary equivalent, it's Finnegan's Wake.
Jonah Lehrer
#30. While human nature largely determines how we hear the notes, it is nurture that lets us hear the music.
Jonah Lehrer
#31. There is a presence in what is missing. That presence is our own.
Jonah Lehrer
#32. And so we keep on thinking, because the next thought might be the answer.
Jonah Lehrer
#33. What you discover when you look at creativity from the perspective of the brain is that it is universal. We're all creative all of the time, we can't help but be creative.
Jonah Lehrer
#35. Cities force us to interact with strangers and with the strange. They pry the mind open. And that is why they are the idea that has unleashed so many of our new ideas.
Jonah Lehrer
#36. Suffering through his classes, the young Igor steeped himself in angst. He would later describe his childhood as 'a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
Jonah Lehrer
#37. The best way to solve a problem? Try explaining it to somebody outside your field.
Jonah Lehrer
#38. The inconsistency of genius is a consistent theme of creativity.
Jonah Lehrer
#39. Children can't help but create: they need to put their mind on the page, they want to paint, to sculpt, to write short stories.
Jonah Lehrer
#40. ...Prions violate most of biology's sacred rules. They are one of those annoying reminders of how much we don't know.
Jonah Lehrer
#41. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It's a skill.
Jonah Lehrer
#42. For too long, we've assumed that there is a single template for human nature, which is why we diagnose most deviations as disorders. But the reality is that there are many different kinds of minds. And that's a very good thing.
Jonah Lehrer
#43. The answer will only arrive after we stop looking for it.
Jonah Lehrer
#44. The benefit of such horizontal interactions - people sharing knowledge across fields - is that it encourages conceptual blending, which is an extremely important part of the insight process.
Jonah Lehrer
#45. Unless you experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong, your brain will never revise its models. Before your neurons can succeed, they must repeatedly fail. There are no shortcuts for this painstaking process.
Jonah Lehrer
#46. When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art.
Jonah Lehrer
#47. In fact, most of us see perseverance as a distinctly uncreative approach, the sort of strategy that people with mediocre ideas are forced to rely on.
Jonah Lehrer
#48. The imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.
Jonah Lehrer
#50. In fact, the only way to remain creative over time
to not be undone by our expertise
is to experiment with ignorance, to stare at things we don't fully understand.
Jonah Lehrer
#51. Harlow would later write, If monkeys have taught us anything, it's that you've got to learn how to love before you learn how to live.
Jonah Lehrer
#52. Expertise is simply the wisdom that emerges from cellular error. Mistakes aren't things to be discouraged. On the contrary, they should be cultivated and carefully investigated.
Jonah Lehrer
#54. New ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.
Jonah Lehrer
#55. Trusting one's emotions requires constant vigilance; intelligent intuition is the result of deliberate practice.
Jonah Lehrer
#56. Creativity is a spark. It can be excruciating when we're rubbing two rocks together and getting nothing. And it can be intensely satisfying when the flame catches and a new idea sweeps around the world.
Jonah Lehrer
#57. If you're trying to be more creative, one of the most important things you can do is increase the volume and diversity of the information to which you are exposed.
Jonah Lehrer
#58. Every creative story is different. And every creative story is the same. There was nothing. Now there is something. It's almost like magic.
Jonah Lehrer
#59. Design is the conscious imposition of meaningful order.
Jonah Lehrer
#61. Creativity is a catchall term for a variety of distinct thought processes.
Jonah Lehrer
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