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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"All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there."
"There is a community of the spirit . . . Open your hands if you want to be held . . . Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking . . . Flow down and down in always widening rings of being."
"I think that music, or at least the kind of music that I make, benefits greatly from improvisation."
"My intentions have been, and are always, to just really get behind what my ideas are musically and to just ride this thing out, cause it feels good, and I think for the most part it's good music. Even when it's not, I'd like to still search for something that could be even like a little bit mind-blowing or shocking to me."
"I think it would be wrong to consider 'Ashes and Fire' a love album. The record is obsessed with time. I believe that there is a kinder view of the self on this record."
"Honestly, I think it's dumb luck that I'm able to kind of get away doing different types of films in different genres. There's always a tendency to kind of stick with what works, or stick with one particular kind of brand or movie. But so far I've been getting away with it, so I'm going to continue to do that for as long as I can."
"There's a lot of actors I think that appear so much more together as the characters they portray as opposed to the actual people, so I know I've said this before: Hollywood's not a place where you're rewarded for growing up."
"My father was a police officer before he retired. One of my brothers is also a police officer, and I think they kind of expected I would do something along those lines, like become a fireman or something."
"I think sometimes Hall of Famers might get labeled as guys who aren't suited for a coaching job or to be back at the Major League level."
"Is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalizing to add color—it’s a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown . . . I’ve tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar."
"So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state."
"I pray. I try to find space to process with a walk on the beach, a hike in the hills. Nature is restorative. I also try not to overreact. I grew up in Ireland, and we are big tea drinkers, and I think it's less about the tea itself and more about the ritual and the moment to prepare."
"No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own . . . and that the trouble they are in is all their own doing . . . is one that they can't or won't entertain."
"I think the major problem in growing up is to become sophisticated without becoming cynical."
"God says to me with a kind of smile, "Hey how would you like to be God awhile And steer the world?" . . . . "How much do I get? What time is lunch?" . . . . "Gimme back that wheel," says God. "I don't think you're quite ready yet.""
"Rockabye Baby, in the treetop Dont you know a treetop is no safe place to rock? And who put you up there, and your cradle too? Baby, I think someone down here has got it in for you!"
"At night my mind does not much care if what it thinks is here or there. It tells me stories, it invents and makes up things that don't make sense. I do not know why it does this stuff. The real world seems quite weird enough."
"When you think about Uber and Airbnb and the other companies that are turning things upside down, Uber isn't big 'cause they ran a lot of ads. They're big because someone took out their iPhone and said to their friend, watch this, and pressed a button and a car pulled up."
"I like to think that I'm giving a voice to the silenced."
"All I do and say and think 'as a poet' is much truer and more intimate than anything I say face to face."
