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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"If I were a painter, I would paint beautiful bodies - I would paint nipples, and I would paint Bibles. Am I going to say, 'I'm not going to paint this woman's neck because people will think I just want to lick on necks?' Please! That's not what art is about."
"Frank Zappa was one of the gods of the Czech underground, I thought of him as a friend. Whenever I feel like escaping from the world of the Presidency, I think of him."
"The tragic incident of Luis Salom reminds us that our sport, our passion, is dangerous. We know it but, in a way, we don't think about it."
"I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly."
"You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change."
"I realized that if my thoughts immediately affect my body, I should be careful about what I think. Now if I get angry, I ask myself why I feel that way. If I can find the source of my anger, I can turn that negative energy into something positive."
"Listen, if you don't talk big game, you never get anywhere. If you don't think big, you don't get big. Some people call it egotistical, some people call it high hopes, some people call it confidence. It's all in how you want to dissect it."
"I couldn't love a woman who inspired me to be totally disinterested. If I fell in love with a woman for an artistic reason, or from the point of view of my work, I think it would rob her of something."
"Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? – diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states . Why, if they follow this conformity business they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive toward colorlessness? But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain."
"I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is."
"I marshalled the words and opened my mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended."
"Time is only an idea. There is only the Reality. Whatever you think it is, it looks like that."
"The ego is like the root of a banyan tree, you think you have removed it all then one fine morning you see a sprout flourishing again."
"As for the concept of collective guilt, I personally think that it is totally unjustified to hold one person responsible for the behavior of another person or a collective of persons."
"I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding."
"Our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts."
"I think psychedelics are sort of like doing calisthenics in preparation for the marathon at the end of time."
"As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking."
"I think I've realized that when you are aiming to create a real body of work, you are as much defined by the things you don't do, as by the things you do."
"I would not think to touch the sky with two arms"
