Thinking Quotes

Moreover I hate everything which merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Is what I did really so bad? So bad I deserve to die? So bad I deserved to die like that?I what I did really so much worse than waht anybody else does?Is it really so much worse than what you do?Think about it.

~ Lauren Oliver

Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Thinking always deceives us when it becomes a substitute for action.

~ Marty Rubin

Thinking is not enough. Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience--any fucking thing. No Holy Grail, No Final Satori, no final solution. Just conflict.

~ William S. Burroughs

Being a philosopher requires a lot of thinking and no action. Being a model requires a lot of action and no thinking.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Successful people achieve because they think beforehand when it works & think afterwards when it doesn't work.

~ Orrin Woodward

The most time consuming process in the world is probably thinking.

~ Amit Kalantri

.the worse experience, the better teacher..

~ Kovo

Thoughts of harmony allow experiences of harmony.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

... in moments of crisis our thoughts do not run consecutively but rather sweep over us in waves or intuition and experience ...

~ John Le Carré

We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.

~ Lynne Truss

Like prepositional phrases, certain structural arrangements in English are much more important than the small bones of grammar in its most technical sense. It really wouldn't matter much if we started dropping the s from our plurals. Lots of words get along without it anyway, and in most cases context would be enough to indicate number. Even the distinction between singular and plural verb forms is just as much a polite convention as an essential element of meaning. But the structures, things like passives and prepositional phrases, constitute, among other things, an implicit system of moral philosophy, a view of the world and its presumed meanings, and their misuse therefore often betrays an attitude or value that the user might like to disavow.

~ Richard Mitchell

We can only think in a language that we master.

~ José Luis Ruiz

Your language indicates──and limits──what you think.

~ Jonathan Price

Necessary features of the human mind impose structure upon our experiences. Language acts as a gatekeeper for the mind. We learn and embark on personal transformation by formulating, revising, and refining our conception of the world each time that we encounter new facts, experiences, ideas, and viewpoints. To understand the world a person must employ reason and organize their episodic personal experiences into a system of narrative thought. The language that we employ to internalize our personal experiences constructs our mental system, and our mental thoughts in turn regulate us. We become of a personification of our language, as expressed in narrative stories of the self.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Humans make tools. Some animals make tools too. The making and using of tools is important for developing language, how we think and speak. If we do not make anything, it affects our thinking.

~ Matthew De Abaitua

The fisherman of the Colombian coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality, for they invented the word sentipensante, or ‘feeling-thinking’ to define language that speaks the truth. Eduardo Galeano

~ Rob Brezsny

The human mind is a rover, it constantly returns to think about times past, cogitates upon the future, and actively considers the entire range of alternative plans to meet our daily survival demands.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I can't escape reality but my mind can twist it for me. Therefore, mind can manipulate things.

~ Aser Alas Jr.

There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything, both ways save us from thinking.

~ Alfred Korzybski

you can accomplish more than you think you can. most of your limitations are in your mind.

~ Ernie J. Zelinski

Every time that we consider our past, examine our present environment, and speculate about the future, we engage in mental projection. Contemplation merges into thinking, and thinking unspools into theorizing suppositions. Every act of attentiveness expands our state of awareness. Deductive surmises represent an ongoing process of making applicable connections between theories and facts. Devising working hypothesis represents one of the highest intellectual achievements of humankind.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The author called us to re-examine assumptions bequeathed to us from Greece and Rome. Just as a bridge built by the Roman Empire might have held up tolerably for centuries under foot traffic but crumble under the weight of a modern truck, the author cautions that classical thinking had limits exposed by contemporary events and certainly exposed by the modern world.

~ Francis A. Schaeffer

Anger is the wind which blows out the lamp of the mind.

~ Bodie Thoene

Why was it that her temper and her thinking never happened at the same time? Her temper behaved like a glutton sitting in an expensive restaurant ordering a hundred dishes, only to disappear when the bill came due. It left her lucid mind to do dishes.

~ Ann Brashares

there are things some people can never understand.there's no point to telling them.

~ Chetan Bhagat

Facts don't care about your feelings.

~ Ben Shapiro

Being must be 'felt' it can not be 'thought.

~ Eckhart Tolle

Feelings should never supersede rational thought... so, if you feel that you've got the answer, you should think some more.

~ Julie Ann Elliott-Morton

Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.

~ Voltaire

Once a man began thinking with his body, intelligent decisions came few and far between.

~ Tanya Huff

When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less.

~ C.s. Lewis

It is curious why anybody should pooh-pooh a study of fossils or various forms of rocks or lava. Such things grant us our only vision into Natural History’s big book; and it isn't a book in first-class condition. Far from it! Just a tiny scrap; a slip; or, possibly a big chunk is found, with nothing notifying us as to how it got to that particular point, nor how long ago. Man can only look at it, lift it, rap it, cut into it, and squint at it through a magnifying glass. And,— think about it. That’s all; until a formal study brings accompanying thoughts from many minds; and, by such tactics, judging that in all probability such and such a rock or fossil footprint is about so old. Natural History holds you in its grasp through just this impossibility of finding actual facts; for it is thus causing you to think. Now, thinking is not only a voluntary function; it is an acquisition; an art. Plants do not think. Animals probably do, but in a primary way, such as an aid in knowing poisonous foods, and how to bring up an offspring with similar ability. But Man can, and should think, and think hard and constantly. It is ridiculous to rush blindly into an action without looking forward to lay out a plan. Such an unthinking custom is almost a panic, and panic is but a mild form of insanity

~ Ernest Vincent Wright

I thought I would stand myself a little dinner. I hadn't quite enough sense to know that what I really wanted was human companions. There aren't such things. Every man is eternally alone. But when you get mixed up with a fairly decent crowd, you forget that appalling fact for long enough to give your brain time to recover from the acute symptoms of its disease - that of thinking.

~ Aleister Crowley

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.

~ Ray Bradbury

Five percent of the people think, ten percent of the people think they think, and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.

~ Thomas A. Edison

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

~ Susan Sontag

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.

~ Voltaire