What makes a Malazan soldier so dangerous? They’re allowed to think.

Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em.

How good people's decisions are under the fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal.

If you’re established in a craft or field, temporary rules may be useful to break a pattern. They can challenge you to become better, to innovate, and to bring out a new side of yourself or your work.

Rules, established with reason and justice, can easily outlive their usefulness as circumstances change, yet can remain in force through inertia. It is then not only right, but useful, to break those rules as a way of advertising the fact that they have become useless — or even actually harmful.

He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger

If you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions the master puts upon you. But then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them....You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist. Your own innocence now is of one who has become an artist, who has been, as it were, transmuted.... You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.

Learning without thinking is useless. Thinking without learning is dangerous.

Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.

Following rules is smart.
It’s efficient.
You don’t need to stop and re-think every situation.

If you want to have useful thoughts, here’s a rule of thumb: Only think about things you can control. That automatically eliminates about 99% of your thoughts because there’s very little you control in life.

Alarm, when used for anything less than a fire or an air attack, is certain to muddle the mind, unsettle the senses, and, in most cases, more than double the danger.

In those days you had to be careful what you thought, because your thoughts would come true. Nowadays you have to be careful what you think because if you think it, it will never happen.

She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.