Conventional measures of mental ability, such as intelligence tests and scholarship, show some of the very highest records belong to INFP and INFJ types, who relegate thinking to last place or next to last. The preference for thinking appears to have far less intellectual effect than the preference for intuition, even in some technical fields, such as scientific research, where its influence was expected to be most important.
Interpretation
Intuition can be more impactful than logical thinking in determining intelligence and success.
In this quote, Isabel Briggs Myers highlights the unexpected importance of intuition over conventional thinking in assessing mental ability. Despite traditional measures focusing on logical reasoning, those with a preference for intuition—like the INFP and INFJ personality types—often achieve remarkable intellectual accomplishments, indicating that creativity and insight can play a significant role in fields typically dominated by analytical thinking.
In practice
In a panel discussion about education, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of creative thinking in learning methodologies.
In teaching, the other main problem related to type is the students’ interest. Intuitives and sensing types differ greatly in what they find interesting in any subject even if they like, that is, are interested in, the same subjects. Intuitives like the principle, the theory, the why. Sensing types like the practical application, the what and the how.
Introverted feeling types have a wealth of warmth and enthusiasm, but they may not show it until they know someone well. They wear their warm side inside, like a fur-lined coat.
Whatever the circumstances of your life, the understanding of type can make your perceptions clearer, your judgements sounder, and your life closer to your heart's desire
You psychologists focus on what is wrong with people; I want to focus on what is right and what could be right.
We . . . must try to live without causing unnecessary harm, not just to fellow humans but to all beings. We must try not to be stingy, or to exploit others. There will be enough pain in the world as it is.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come.
I've had years of bizarre hallucinogenic magical experiences in which I believed I had communicated with entities that may well have been disassociated parts of my own personality or conceivably some independent entity of a metaphysical nature. Both would seem equally interesting.
Dislike what deserves it, but never hate: for that is of the nature of malice; which is almost ever to persons, not things, and is one of the blackest qualities sin begets in the soul.
The secret was such an old one now, had so grown into me and become a part of myself, that I could not tear it away.
exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.
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