Thinking quotes
95.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside thinking — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?"
"Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world."
"When mental development is under discussion, there are many who say, 'How does movement come into it? We are talking about the mind.' And when we think of intellectual activity, we always imagine people sitting still, motionless. But mental development must be connected with movement and be dependent on it. It is vital that educational theory and practice should be informed by that idea."
"I don't think we are here for anything. We're just products of evolution. You can say, "Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose." But I'm anticipating a good lunch."
"How many people in the United States do you think will be willing to go to war to free Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania?"
"Animals don't have a voice, so I think it is our job to give them one."
"Journalism only tells us what men are doing; it is fiction that tells us what they are thinking, and still more what they are feeling. If a new scientific theory finds the soul of a man in his dreams, at least it ought not to leave out his day-dreams. And all fiction is only a diary of day-dreams instead of days. And this profound preoccupation of men's minds with certain things always eventually has an effect even on the external expression of the age."
"It is always much easier, I have discovered, to make people cry or gasp than to make them think."
"I think the Chinese will say the hell with you and pull their money out of the United States. That's the end of our wars."
"One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod."
"I think I get laid less now than I used to, because I’m way more paranoid now."
"When geologists announced the beginning of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, humans destroying the environment, one of the main things they pointed to is the use of plastics in the earth. We don't think about it, but it has a tremendous effect. But these are things you don't see right in front of your eyes. You need to think about them a little, to see what the consequences are. It's easy to put them aside, and the media don't talk about them."
"The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together - with a thin paste of flour and water... I don't think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky... but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter."
"You see, I think negative emotions are always trumped by positive emotions."
"Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg, by the side of which more will be laid."
"We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,--at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives onthe sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird."
"Whether you think you will succeed or not, you are right."
"It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them."
"I find that people today tend to use them interchangeably. I use African-American, because I teach African Studies as well as African-American Studies, so it's easy, neat and convenient. But sometimes, when you're in a barber shop, somebody'll say, "Did you see what that Negro did?" A lot of people slip in and out of different terms effortlessly, and I don't think the thought police should be on patrol."
"Keep your libraries, your penal institutions, your insaneasylums... give me beer.You think man needs rule, he needs beer. The world does not need morals, it needs beer... The souls of men have been fed with indigestibles, but the soul could make use of beer."
