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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"I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off."
"Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke."
"And said to myself, as I lit my cigar, "Supposing a man had the wealth of the Czar Of the Russias to boot, for the rest of his days, On the whole do you think he would have much to spare If he married a woman with nothing to wear?"
"Man's life is thought, And he, despite his terror, cannot cease Ravening through century after century, Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come Into the desolation of reality."
"All think what other people think; All know the man their neighbor knows. Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way?"
"An intellectual hatred is the worst, So let her think opinions are accursed. Have I not seen the loveliest woman born Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn, Because of her opinionated mind Barter that horn and every good By quiet natures understood For an old bellows full of angry wind?"
"I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one's self."
"I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right."
"I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind."
"I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it."
"Why do you wear a mask and hood?" I think everybody will in the near future," was the man in black's reply. "They're terribly comfortable."
"Westley: This is true love — you think this happens every day?"
"Fezzik's in trouble, bubble bubble, His brain is just not in the pink, His mind is rubble, rub-a-dub double, Because everyone needs him to think."
"Miracle Max: Have fun stormin' da castle. Valerie: Think it'll work? Miracle Max: It would take a miracle."
"Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly."
"If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take us as long to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of facts which filled them."
"Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious."
"The English seem to think drinking wine is like committing adultery, something you do rarely and abroad."
"The consciousness-expanding drugs - the hallucinogens, such as cannabis, mescaline, LSD, Psylocybin - I think are useful to a writer up to a certain point. That is, they open psychic areas that would not otherwise be available to the writer. But I feel that once these areas have been opened and the writer has reached them, he is able to get back there in the future without the drug."
"What originally established the band was cover songs like Not Fade Away. Then, later on, we got more well-known ones like Satisfaction, which you might say echoed the thinking of, well, any generation you care to name, including the present one. But we didn't set out on bits of paper that we were going to be the voice of a generation. The original aim of the Rolling Stones was to play blues. It wasn't even to play rock music."
