Thinking Quotes

Thinking The talking of the soul with itself.

Plato

If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.

Erich Fromm

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

John Kenneth Galbraith

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

No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking.

Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire

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

Matthew Arnold

A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.

Sren Aaby Kierkegaard

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

Calvin S. Hall

Some of your countrymen were unable to distinguish between their native dislike for war and the stainless patriotism of those who suffered its scars. But there has been a rethinking and now we can say to you, and say as a nation, thank you for your courage.

Ronald Reagan

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.

Albert Einstein

Enzymes are things invented by biologists that explain things which otherwise require harder thinking.

Jerome Lettvin

There is an art of which every man should be a master the art of reflection. If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all.

William Hart Coleridge

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

William Shakespeare

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

George Orwell

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

William Fullbright

Negative thinking is always expensive - - Dragging us down mentally, emotionally, and physically - - Hence I refer to any indulgence in it as a luxury.

Peter McWilliams

Science cannot stop while ethics catches up - - And nobody should expect scientists to do all the thinking for the country.

Elvin Stackman

Not being tense but ready. Not thinking but not dreaming. Not being set but flexible. Liberation from the uneasy sense of confinement. It is being wholly and quietly alive, aware and alert, ready for whatever may come.

Bruce Lee

Men, I want you just thinking of one word all season. One word and one word only: Super Bowl.

Bill Peterson, football coach

To do anything in this world worth doing, we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in, and scramble through as well as we can.

Sydney Smith

Thinking things has been done through the ages; knowing things remains to be done.

Author Unknown

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

Alfred North Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two - Thirds of the people of the Earth might be killed, but enough men capable of thinking, and enough books, would be left to start again, and civilization could be restored.

Albert Einstein

All dogmas perish the thinking mind, especially ones you agree with.

Adam Richardson

Take time to deliberate but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in.

Andrew Old Hickory Jackson

The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.

Theodore Rubin

To be always thinking about your manners is not the way to make them good; the very perfection of manners is not to think about yourself.

Richard Whately

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

Lyndon B. Johnson

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

The worst thing you can possibly do is worrying and thinking about what you could have done.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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 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

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

Havelock Ellis

Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Speak to me as to thy thinkings, As thou dost ruminate, and give thy worst of thoughts The worst of words.

William Shakespeare, "Othello", Act 3 scene 3

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.

Edward Gibbon

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