780 Thinking Quotes

A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things but cannot receive great ones.

Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map. Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is.

Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

The important thing isn't the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

I just want to live each moment, but it's kind of hard to do that when you are asked to analyze yourself constantly. But it's also good in that you are forced to think about things that you don't ordinarily think about. I think it's strange.

Maybe that's what Hell is. You go mad. And all your demons come and get you just as fast as you can think them up.

A thought is a screen, not a mirror; that is why you live in a thought envelope, untouched by Reality.

It is just that we should be grateful, not only to those with whose views we may agree, but also to those who have expressed more superficial views; for these also contributed something, by developing before us the powers of thought.

It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.

That in the soul which is called the mind is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing.

If only our great thinkers could learn to talk, and our great talkers could learn to think.

By using your intelligence, you can sometimes make your problems twice as complicated.

You have your thoughts and I have mine. This is the fact and you can't change it even if you kill me.

Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical.

Our mind is all we've got. Not that it won't lead us astray sometimes, but we still have to analyze things out within ourselves.

Keep violence in the mind where it belongs.

The possession of anything begins in the mind.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

By an object, I mean anything that we can think, i.e. anything we can talk about.

The polls undoubtedly help to decide what people think, but their most important long-term influence may be on how people think. The interrogative process is very distinctly weighted against the asking of an intelligent question or the recording of a thoughtful answer.

The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom.

If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think.

There is no such crime as a crime of thought; there are only crimes of action.

I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.

Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes, It will vanish and the stars will shine again, Because, for all our power and weight and size, We are nothing more than children of your brain!

There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.

Think for yourself and question authority.

The cliche organizes life; it expropriates people's identity; it becomes ruler, defense lawyer, judge, and the law.

The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

Governmental regulations all carry coercion to some degree, and even where they don't, they habituate man to expect teaching, guidance and help outside himself, instead of formulating his own.

In order to bring about the transition from the condition of the present to another newly resolved on, every reform should be allowed to proceed as much as possible from men's minds and thoughts.

The most stimulating and encouraging thought is that you, dearest father, and my dear sister, are well, that I am an honest German, and that if I am not always permitted to talk I can think what I please; but that is all.

I don't mind your thinking slowly; I mind your publishing faster than you think.

Thoughts are things.

Point of view is worth 80 IQ points

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language. #109

I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. 'What's new?' is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question 'What is best?,' a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and 'best' was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.

'Among those who give thoughts to things, is there one who does not think of suicide?' With me was the knowledge that that fellow Ikkyu twice contemplated suicide. I have 'that fellow', because the priest Ikkyu is known even to children as a most amusing person, and because anecdotes about his limitlessly eccentric behavior have come down to us in ample numbers. It is said of him that children climbed his knee to stroke his beard, that wild birds took feed from his hand. It would seem from all this that he was the ultimate in mindlessness, that he was an approachable and gentle sort of priest. As a matter of fact he was the most severe and profound of Zen priests. Said to have been the son of an emperor, he entered a temple at the age of six, and early showed his genius as a poetic prodigy. At the same time he was troubled with the deepest of doubts about religion and life. 'If there is a god, let him help me. If there is none, let me throw myself to the bottom of the lake and become food for fishes.' Leaving behind these words he sought to throw himself into a lake, but was held back. ... He gave his collected poetry the title 'Collection of the Roiling Clouds', and himself used the expression 'Roiling Clouds' as a pen name. In his collection and its successor are poems quite without parallel in the Chinese and especially the Zen poetry of the Japanese middle ages, erotic poems and poems about the secrets of the bedchamber that leave one in utter astonishment. He sought, by eating fish and drinking spirits and having commerce with women, to go beyond the rules and proscriptions of the Zen of his day, and to seek liberation from them, and thus, turning against established religious forms, he sought in the pursuit of Zen the revival and affirmation of the essence of life, of human existence, in a day civil war and moral collapse.

Great wits jump.

Think and grow rich.

Cogito, ergo sum.

Je pense, donc je suis.