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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"Habit 1: Be Proactive Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind Habit 3: Put First Things First Habit 4: Think Win/Win Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood Habit 6: Synergize Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw"
"Isn't it kind of silly to think that tearing someone else down builds you up?"
"Muggles have garden gnomes, too, you know," Harry told Ron as they crossed the lawn. "Yeah, I've seen those things they think are gnomes," said Ron, bent double with his head in a peony bush, "like fat little Santa Clauses with fishing rods."
"Sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them - their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table."
"You don't think your way to creative work. You work your way to creative thinking."
"The real problems are cultural. The problems of the people who take drugs as a cultural trap - I think there's a real problem there, the crack stuff, the hopelessness of the junkie. The urban angst."
"It is better to think of church in the ale-house than to think of the ale-house in church."
"Most men will not swim before they are able to.' Is not that witty? Naturally, they won't swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won't think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what's more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown."
"I think the biggest disease the world suffers from in this day and age is the disease of people feeling unloved. I know that I can give love for a minute, for half an hour, for a day, for a month, but I can give. I am very happy to do that, I want to do that."
"We should not lay all past mistakes on Chairman Mao. So we must be very objective in assessing him. His contributions were primary, his mistakes secondary. In China, we will inherit the many good things in Chairman Mao's thinking while at the same time explaining clearly the mistakes he made."
"We do God’s work for our brothers and sisters when we learn to listen to them. So often Christians, especially preachers, think that their only service is always to have to 'offer' something when they are together with other people. They forget that listening can be a greater service than speaking. Many people seek a sympathetic ear and do not find it among Christians, because these Christians are talking even when they should be listening."
"I think the first virtue is to restrain the tongue; he approaches nearest to gods who knows how to be silent, even though he is in the right."
"I was in California when this journalist made a blanket statement about the fact that she did not think that black men and women had the kind of love relationship that Rebecca and Nathan had in Sounder."
"Everyone is a mirror image of yourself-your own thinking coming back to you."
"A goodly portly man, i' faith, and a corpulent; of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage; and, as I think, his age some fifty, or, by'r Lady, inclining to threescore; and now I remember me, his name is Falstaff."
"Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act."
"Love is the expression of the one who loves, not of the one who is loved. Those who think they can love only the people they prefer do not love at all. Love discovers truths about individuals that others cannot see"
"The conservative "thinks of political policies as intended to preserve order, justice, and freedom. The ideologue, on the contrary, thinks of politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature. In his march toward Utopia, the ideologue is merciless."
"Stop thinking, and end your problems."
"If you think of standardization as the best that you know today, but which is to be improved tomorrow; you get somewhere."
