Thinking Quotes

Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right.

~ Henry Ford

...and you drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, 'That was fine'. And your life is a long line of fine.

~ Gillian Flynn

The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.

~ Horace Walpole

Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.

~ Jean Racine

Don't JustDon't just learn, experience.Don't just read, absorb.Don't just change, transform.Don't just relate, advocate.Don't just promise, prove.Don't just criticize, encourage.Don't just think, ponder.Don't just take, give.Don't just see, feel.Don’t just dream, do. Don't just hear, listen.Don't just talk, act.Don't just tell, show.Don't just exist, live.

~ Roy T. Bennett

Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.

~ Criss Jami

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.

~ Emil M. Cioran

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.

~ Fernando Pessoa

People don’t like to think, if one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.

~ Helen Keller

In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don't try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.

~ Lao Tzu

Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

~ Steve Jobs

That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.

~ Nicole Krauss

When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.

~ Peter Matthiessen

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

~ Terry Pratchett

Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

No brain at all, some of them [people], only grey fluff that's blown into their heads by mistake, and they don't Think.

~ A.a. Milne

How ghastly for her, people actually thinking, with their brains, and right next door. Oh, the travesty of it all.

~ Gail Carriger

I’ve been thinking.” “A dangerous pursuit.” “Indeed.

~ Victoria Schwab

We are addicted to our thoughts. We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking.

~ Santosh Kalwar

Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Whenever I think of something but can't think of what it was I was thinking of, I can't stop thinking until I think I'm thinking of it again. I think I think too much.

~ Criss Jami

To assess the quality of thoughts of people, don't listen to their words, but watch their actions.

~ Amit Kalantri

Nothing is as it seems, but something is everything it is made out to be.

~ Carroll Bryant

For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.

~ Plato

Words are the clothes thoughts wear.

~ Samuel Beckett

Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch – or build a cyclotron – without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think. “But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call ‘human nature,’ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs, or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival – so that for you, who are a human being, the question ‘to be or not to be’ is the question ‘to think or not to think.’ . . . “Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. . . Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history (pages 1012-1013).

~ Ayn Rand

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

~ Ray Bradbury

I don’t have a philosophy: I have senses...If I talk about Nature, it’s not because I know what it is,But because I love it, and that’s why I love it,Because when you love you never know what you love,Or why you love, or what love is.Loving is eternal innocence,And the only innocence is not thinking.

~ Alberto Caeiro

Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.

~ Criss Jami

We awaken by asking the right questions. We awaken when we see knowledge being spread that goes against our own personal experiences. We awaken when we see popular opinion being wrong but accepted as being right, and what is right being pushed as being wrong. We awaken by seeking answers in corners that are not popular. And we awaken by turning on the light inside when everything outside feels dark.

~ Suzy Kassem

The best ideas will eat at you for days, maybe even weeks, until something, some incident, some impulse, triggers you to finally express them.

~ Criss Jami

With a philosophy education, one can infuriate his peers, intimidate his date, think of obscure, unreliable ways to make money, and never regret a thing.

~ Criss Jami

To be a philosopher, just reverse everything you have ever been told...and have a sense of humor doing it.

~ Criss Jami

Perhaps this general degradation was the result of too much crowding, too little privacy, too much noise. You couldn't be decent if you weren't intelligent; you couldn't be intelligent if you couldn't think—and who could think in all this racket? Add the stench to the confusion of cramped quarters, and who could be self-respecting?

~ Lloyd C. Douglas

Some of my best ideas come from when I'm sitting on the toilet.

~ Anthony T Hincks

Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

~ Steve Jobs

A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years.

~ Byron Katie

Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.

~ Baruch Spinoza

Never judge someone's character based on the words of another. Instead, study the motives behind the words of the person casting the bad judgment. An honest woman can sell tangerines all day and remain a good person until she dies, but there will always be naysayers who will try to convince you otherwise. Perhaps this woman did not give them something for free, or at a discount. Perhaps too, that she refused to stand with them when they were wrong — or just stood up for something she felt was right. And also, it could be that some bitter women are envious of her, or that she rejected the advances of some very proud men. Always trust your heart. If the Creator stood before a million men with the light of a million lamps, only a few would truly see him because truth is already alive in their hearts. Truth can only be seen by those with truth in them. He who does not have Truth in his heart, will always be blind to her.

~ Suzy Kassem

Where we fall are the stepping-stones for our journey.

~ Lolly Daskal