Thinking Quotes

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

Edward R. Murrow

The mind ought sometimes to be diverted that it may return the better to thinking.

Phaedrus

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

Matthew Arnold

A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking meant for others!

Donatien - Alphonse - Francois de Sade

Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.

Albert Szent - Gyorgi

We must dare to think about unthinkable things because when things become unthinkable thinking stops and action becomes mindless.

William Fullbright

We must dare to think unthinkable thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world. We must learn to welcome and not to fear the voices of dissent. We must dare to think about unthinkable things because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.

James W. Fulbright, March 27, 1964

The ideal life is in our blood and never will be still. Sad will be the day for any man when he becomes contented with the thoughts he is thinking and the deeds he is doing - - where there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger, which he knows that he was meant and made to do.

Phillips Brooks

All the problems of the world could be settled if people were only willing to think. The trouble is that people very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.

Thomas J. Watson

To be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious of our own existence.

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

A good listener is usually thinking about something else.

Kin Hubbard

Quit thinking that you must halt before the barrier of inner negativity. You need not. You can crash through... whatever we see a negative state, that is where we can destroy it.

Vernon Howard

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

Christopher Morley

Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.

William James

Stubborness does have its helpful features. You always know what you are going to be thinking tomorrow.

Glen Beaman

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

Sir William Bragg

Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again.

Evelyn Underhill

That everybody is allowed to learn to read spoileth in the long run not only writing but thinking.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.

George Orwell

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Alfred North Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

Benjamin Disraeli

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

Thomas A. Edison

Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.

Zig Zigla

By always thinking unto them. I keep the subject constantly before me and wait till the first dawnings open little by little into the full light.

Sir Issac Newton, On how he made discoveries

There is a great deal of wishful thinking in such cases it is the easiest thing of all to deceive ones self.

Demosthenes

Thinking is like loving and dying. Each of us must do it for himself.

Josiah Royce

We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of things? but there are times when we stop. We sit sill. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.

James Carroll, O Magazine, October 2002

I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought What the hell good would that do.

Ronnie Shakes

STRATEGY is; A style of thinking, a conscious and deliberate process, an intensive implementation system, the science of insuring FUTURE SUCCESS.

Pete Johnson

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think it would be totally inappropriate for me to even contemplate what I am thinking about.

Don Mazankowski

A nation that draws too broad a difference between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards, and its fighting done by fools.

Thucydides

Stop thinking, and end your problems.

Lao Tzu

Effective thinking consists of being able to arrive at the truth truth being defined as that which exists.

Calvin S. Hall

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

George Bernard Shaw

I always have a quotation for everything, it saves original thinking.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Congealed thinking is the forerunner of failure... make sure you are always receptive to new ideas.

George Crane