Thinking Quotes

Readers are plentiful, thinkers are rare.

~ Harriet Martineau

If you crave for Knowledge, the banquet of Knowledge grows and groans on the board until the finer appetite sickens. If, still putting all your trust in Knowledge, you try to dodge the difficulty by specialising, you produce a brain bulging out inordinately on one side, on the other cut flat down and mostly paralytic at that: and in short so long as I hold that the Creator has an idea of a man, so long shall I be sure that no uneven specialist realises it. The real tragedy of the Library at Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate.... but we may agree that, in reading, it is not quantity so much that tells, as quality and thoroughness of digestion.

~ Arthur Quiller-Couch

Keep reading! Keep travelling! Keep thinking! And finally you will be there, in the Land of Wisdom where the mind has the power of an eagle’s eye!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Some people just need to read and think, to spend time alone sorting through the stories in their heads

~ Ronald T. Potter-Efron

But by that time Lady Harman had acquired the habit of reading and the habit of thinking over what she read, and from that it is an easy step to thinking over oneself and the circumstances of one's own life. The one thing trains for the other.

~ H.g. Wells

It's strange because sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book. Also, when I write letters, I spend the next two days thinking about what I figured out in my letters.

~ Stephen Chbosky

All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mindabout nothing -- to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.

~ John Keats

Pooh hasn't much Brain, but he never comes to any harm. He does silly things and they turn out right. There's Owl. Owl hasn't exactly got Brain, but he Knows Things. He would know the Right Thing to Do when Surrounded by Water. There's Rabbit. He hasn't Learnt in Books, but he can always Think of a Clever Plan. There's Kanga. She isn't Clever, Kanga isn't, but she would be so anxious about Roo that she would do a Good Thing to Do without thinking about it. And then there's Eeyore. And Eeyore is so miserable anyhow that he wouldn't mind about this.

~ A.a. Milne

Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything. Granted, granted I'm a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler, as we all are. But what's to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble--that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.

~ Helen Keller

What are wits for unless a man uses them?

~ Ellis Peters

It's a strange idea people have that thinking makes one intelligent.

~ Marty Rubin

At forty two years, Sona Kilroy stood tall and strapping, a powerful figure. Rising to the rank of Admiral in the Corsair fleet was no easy feat. It took intelligence, talent, determination, resilience, creative thinking, brute force, and sheer cunning to achieve – and perhaps also a large slice of luck.

~ Christina Engela

Sight is seeing what's there, vision is seeing what's possible

~ Retin Obasohan

Well, the terrible fact is that though we are all more or less thinking of something or other all the time, some of us are thinking more and some less.Some brains are battling and working and remembering and puzzling things over all the time and other brains are just lying down, snoring and occasionally turning over. It is to the lazy minds that I am now speaking, and from my own experience I imagine this includes nineteen people out of every twenty. I am one of that clan myself and always have been.

~ Ted Hughes

Wisdom is the intelligent use of our knowledge, whereas sensibility is an intelligent use of our judgment.

~ Pearl Zhu

I sit back and try to think. I've been discovering, much to my dismay, that I'm not a criminal mastermind or anything. I'm just brute force and my powers in no way include super-intelligence, which kind of pisses me off.

~ Kelly Thompson

Now we’ve a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

We very often fail to think as carefully about helping others as we could, mistakenly believing that applying data and rationality to a charitable endeavor robs the act of virtue. And that means we pass up opportunities to make a tremendous difference.

~ William Macaskill

The nobles had made reading unpopular, as it showed that one couldn’t afford to buy spells or magical devices, since one had to get knowledge to do things the ordinary way; even if this view held little logic, the king himself was known to insult readers as “bookfaces” or “unable to think for themselves, so they need to spout what others have said,” and these opinions became popular, as did most views expressed by the king or his son.

~ Colleen Chen

I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.

~ Elon Musk

Only the man who thinks himself a fool is as wise as he thinks.

~ Criss Jami

When, despite considerable intelligence, a thinker cannot think straight, it becomes very likely that he cannot face his thoughts.

~ J. Budziszewski

There are still very few laws against thinking, although I am sure they're working hard on that in Washington.

~ Jeff Lindsay

The survival of poor opinions can make a thinker feel as though he is failing humanity.

~ Criss Jami

Thinking is a human feature. Will AI someday really think? That's like asking if submarines swim. If you call it swimming then robots will think, yes.

~ Noam Chomsky

To be intuitive is to possess a godly characteristic: to be bad at second-guessing the good.

~ Criss Jami

Be careful not to appear obsessively intellectual. When intelligence fills up, it overflows a parody.

~ Criss Jami

What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.

~ Walter Benjamin

Being different and thinking different makes a person unforgettable. History does not remember the forgettable.

~ Suzy Kassem

When we begin to think like everybody else thinks, that is dangerous. Individualism is part of our divine endowment. God made us as individuals and we are responsible before Him.

~ Dr. J. Otis Yoder

To be of value to humanity, start by thinking for yourself.

~ Suzy Kassem

Thinking is the hardest work anyone can do, which is probably the reason why we have so few thinkers.

~ Thomas S. Monson

Let your autobiography contain these words; I was able to think positively, love affectionately and work efficiently. Thinking, loving and working are what make us different from animals and trees.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

No one plows the field just by thinking about it.

~ Ljupka Cvetanova

We are always in these days endeavoring to separate intellect and manual labor; we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen in the best sense.

~ John Ruskin

If you think along the lines of Nature then you think properly. from the video Carl Jung speaks about death

~ C.g. Jung

To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces. The sea air, sunshine, and patience, Watson—all else will come.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I am extremely happy walking on the downs...I like to have space to spread my mind out in.

~ Virginia Woolf