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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"It is only the Negro leadership, the bourgeois, hand-picked, handful of Negroes who think that they're going to get some kind of respect, recognition, or protection from the Government."
"I think the only way one can really determine whether extremism in the defense of liberty is justified, is not to approach it as an american or a european or an African or an Asian, but as a human being. If we look upon it as different types, immediately we begin to think in terms of extremism being good for one and bad for another, or bad for one and good for another. But if we look upon it, if we look upon ourselves as human beings, I doubt that anyone will deny that extremism in defense of liberty, the liberty of any human being, is no vice."
"I'm vain enough to think that I've made a successful life. I've had everything I've ever wanted. You can't beat that."
"I finish a lot of lyrics while I'm in the water and it's always pretty constructive for me to get out in the water. I'm not actually writing the words down, but I have time to think about words, and doing a lot of surfing usually gives me a little space and peace of mind to finish things up."
"This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do."
"Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind... The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise."
"In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, amorality and hiperexcitation."
"To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing."
"Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen."
"The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror."
"The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you."
"Now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion."
"Psychedelics are extraordinary tools, when used with psychotherapy, because in one day you can let go of so much, and have insight into so much. Sometimes more than in a year of traditional psychotherapy. I think they should be used in psychotherapy. But I don't know who should be entrusted with the toolbox - priests or psychiatrists? That is the difficulty."
"Do you think God knew what he was doing when he created woman?"
"I think umpires have too much power, without any system of checks and balances and the more money a player makes, the more the umpire tries to show off that power to him. Unfortunately, since I signed my contract my strike zone has suddenly become a lot larger."
"I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful."
"There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won't remember and that she can't even let herself think about because that's when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow endless drizzle."
"I think everyone should have a personal mission to leave the Earth a better place for them having lived in it and let Earth then take it from there."
"When I shop for fruit & melons I like to hold a grape next to a cantaloupe & think of Earth next to Jupiter. Then I eat Earth."
"Most people think it's the other way around: that time is going faster and we're doing less. But really time seems to be going faster because we're cramming so much into it."
