“Thought expands, but paralyzes; action animates, but narrows.”
Quote collection
Thinking Quotes — page 996 of 4756
“What must the English and French think of the language of our philosophers when we Germans do not understand it ourselves?”
“There is a great difference, whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general or sees the general in the particular. From the former procedure there ensues allegory, in which the particular serves only as illustration, as example of the general. The latter procedure, however, is genuinely the nature of poetry; it expresses something particular, without thinking of the general or pointing to it.”
“Analysis and synthesis are both as necessary to the thinking spirit as inspiration and expiration to the organism.”
“Do people conform to the instructions of us old ones? Each thinks he must know best about himself, and thus many are lost entirely.”
“To act is easy; to think is hard.”
“If we meet someone who owes us a debt of gratitude, we remember the fact at once. How often we can meet someone to whom we owe a debt of gratitude without thinking about it at all!”
“The bad thing is that thinking about thought doesn't help at all; one has to have it from nature so that the good ideas appear before us like free children of God calling to us: Here we are.”
“Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.”
“Whatever we think out, whatever we take in hand to do, should be perfectly and finally finished, that the world, if it must alter, will only have to spoil it; we have then nothing to do but unite the severed, to recollect and restore the dismembered.”
“Superstition belongs to the essence of mankind and takes refuge, when one thinks one has suppressed it completely, in the strangest nooks and crannies; once it is safely ensconced there, it suddenly reappears.”
“Where a man has a passion for meditating without the capacity of thinking, a particular idea fixes itself fast, and soon creates a mental disease.”
“The greatest piece of folly is that every man thinks himself compelled to hand down what people think they have known.”
“Man usually believes, if only words he hears, That also with them goes material for thinking. [Ger., Gewohnlich glaubt der Mensch, wenn er nur Worte hort, Es musse sich dabei doch auch was denken.]”
“One usually thinks people to be more dangerous than they are.”
“Happy contractedness of youth, nay, of mankind in general, that they think neither of the high nor the deep, of the true nor the false, but only of what is suited to their own conceptions.”
“There is nothing worth thinking but it has been thought before; we must only try to think it again.”
“In art it's not the thinking that does the job, but making.”
“I shall have liberty to think for myself without molesting others or being molested myself.”
“You know, when someone hurts my feelings, somehow it does not comfort me to know that it was deliberate... On the other hand, knowing that someone else thinks they are assholes helps a great deal." "I think that's some kind of rule for the universe.”