Selected thinking quotes

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

2. What luck for rulers that men do not think.

3. 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.

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

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. There is always a philosophy for lack of courage.

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

9. 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.

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

11. The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

12. 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.

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

14. 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.

15. 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.

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

17. Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.

18. Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.

19. 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.

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

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

22. The soul never thinks without a picture.

23. I'm not always depressed: only when I think and feel.

24. It can take a surprisingly long time to get from one part of my mind to another.

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

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

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

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

29. 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.

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

31. 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.

32. Keep violence in the mind where it belongs.

33. The possession of anything begins in the mind.

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

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

36. 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.

37. 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.

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

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

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

41. I know for sure that what we dwell on is who we become.

42. I've found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize that they had really heard new things: that is things that they had never heard before. They kept translating what they heard into their habitual language. They had ceased to hope and believe there might be anything new.

43. But Greece and her foundations are Built below the tide of war, Based on the crystalline sea Of thought and its eternity; Her citizens, imperial spirits, Rule the present from the past, On all this world of men inherits Their seal is set.

44. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.

45. True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independence of thought and action, not tutelage under European schoolmasters. It is science but not its wrong application to life.

46. The ancestor of every action is a thought.

47. If you can't read and write you can't think. Your thoughts are dispersed if you don't know how to read and write. You've got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were.

48. I call on you not to hate, because hate does not leave space for a person to be fair and it makes you blind and closes all doors of thinking.

49. The student who would build his knowledge on solid foundations, and proceed by just degrees to the pinnacles of truth, is directed by the great philosopher of France to begin by doubting of his own existence. In like manner, whoever would complete any arduous and intricate enterprise, should, as soon as his imagination can cool after the first blaze of hope, place before his own eyes every possible embarrassment that may retard or defeat him. He should first question the probability of success, and then endeavour to remove the objections that he has raised.

50. No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

51. The best part of human language, properly so called, is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself.

52. Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing.

53. It is a flat'ning Thought, that the more we have seen, the less we have to say.

54. Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.

55. I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.

56. To find yourself, think for yourself.

57. Equations are just the boring part of mathematics. I attempt to see things in terms of geometry.

58. I despair of persuading people to drop the familiar and comforting tactic of dichotomy. Perhaps, instead, we might expand the framework of debates by seeking other dichotomies more appropriate than, or simply different from, the conventional divisions. All dichotomies are simplifications, but the rendition of a conflict along differing axes of several orthogonal dichotomies might provide an amplitude of proper intellectual space without forcing us to forgo our most comforting tool of thought.

59. I strongly reject any conceptual scheme that places our options on a line, and holds that the only alternative to a pair of extreme positions lies somewhere between them. More fruitful perspectives often require that we step off the line to a site outside the dichotomy.

60. Impartial observers from other planets would consider ours an utterly bizarre enclave if it were populated by birds, defined as flying animals, that nevertheless rarely or never actually flew. They would also be perplexed if they encountered in our seas, lakes, rivers, and ponds, creatures defined as swimmers that never did any swimming. But they would be even more surprised to encounter a species defined as a thinking animal if, in fact, the creature very rarely indulged in actual thinking.

61. We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.

62. Fill the brain with high thoughts, highest ideals, place them day and night before you, and out of that will come great work.

63. If superstition enters, the brain is gone.

64. Imagination, not intelligence, made us human.

65. Change the way you think, and you are halfway to changing the world.

66. The finest minds seem to be formed rather by efforts at original thinking, by endeavours to form new combinations, and to discover new truths, than by passively receiving the impressions of other men's ideas.

67. It's not like I idolize this one guy Machiavelli. I idolize that type of thinking where you do whatever's gonna make you achieve your goal.

68. There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.

69. Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea They thought great thoughts about liberty Poets wrote down words that did fit Writers wrote books Thinkers thought about it.

70. No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.

71. How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

72. Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends.

73. It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations; but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations.

74. The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.

75. They who drink beer will think beer.

76. It is sexual energy which governs the structure of human feeling and thinking.

77. Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.

78. Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think what you shall write.

79. I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

80. As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking.

81. Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.

82. The proper method for hastening the decay of error, is not, by brute force, or by regulation which is one of the classes of force, to endeavour to reduce men to intellectual uniformity; but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself.

83. Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.

84. A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

85. It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies.

86. We cannot observe external things without some degree of Thought; nor can we reflect upon our Thoughts, without being influenced in the course of our reflection by the Things which we have observed.

87. A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.

88. O Reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle Reader! you would find A tale in everything.

89. All this contains much that is obviously true, and much that is relevant; unfortunately, what is obviously true is not relevant, and what is relevant is not obviously true.

90. I can't concentrate when I'm thinking.

91. For a thinking man is where Wisdom is at home.

92. 'The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.'

93. Three minutes' thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

94. But men at whiles are sober And think by fits and starts, And if they think, they fasten Their hands upon their hearts.

95. A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion.

96. Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

97. Innovation is not the product of logical thought, even though the final product is tied to a logical structure.

98. To the question whether I am a pessimist or an optimist, I answer that my knowledge is pessimistic, but my willing and hoping are optimistic.

99. There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.

100. Wit lies in recognizing the resemblance among things which differ and the difference between things which are alike.