thinking Quotes

“There are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven’t started wondering about yet.”

“It isn’t what we say or think that defines us, but what we do.”

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

“Things are not quite as bad as you think.”

“It’s nicer to think dear, pretty thoughts and keep them in one’s heart, like treasures. I don’t like to have them laughed at or wondered over.”

“Sometimes people use thought to not participate in life.”

“I’m going to write it down because maybe if I do I won’t have to think about it. And I won’t get upset.”

“O teach me how I should forget to think.”

“We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.”

“Ponder and deliberate before you make a move.”

“There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.”

“I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone, I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again, I am to see to it that I do not lose you.”

“Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think.”

“You’re bound to get idears if you go thinkin’ about stuff.”

“Too many problems in this world are caused by men with noble dispositions and clouded minds.”

“Magic is the art of thinking, not strength or language . . . ”

“I won’t tell you what to believe, Eragon. It is far better to be taught to think critically and then be allowed to make your own decisions than to have someone else’s notions thrust upon you.”

“On its own, being a decent person is no guarantee that you will act well, which brings us back to the one protection we have against demagogues, tricksters, and the madness of crowds . . . : clear and reasoned thinking.”

“From now on you’re going to have to think. There’s a reason why we’re born with brains in our heads, not rocks.”

“And once you are in motion, do not allow your thoughts to distract you. Think without thinking, so that you act as if out of instinct and not reason.”

“Wise? No, I’ve just learned how to think.”

“I would also contend that if you had to choose between giving a man a noble disposition or teaching him to think clearly, you’d do better to teach him to think clearly. Too many problems in this world are caused by men with noble dispositions and clouded minds.”

“I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.”

“He read a lot. He used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.”

“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.”

“A guy sets alone out here at night, maybe readin’ books or thinkin’ or stuff like that.”

“I gotta think about that. We was always gonna do it by ourselves.”

Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.

Men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent, as when they are at stool.

“‘Now I am depressed myself,’ I said. ‘That’s why I never think about these things. I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking.‘”

“O Judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts, And men have lost their reason!”

“Little Lotte thought of everything and nothing.”

“Think a little,” I replied, “you are quite as capable as I am of finding out the way, even if you do not know the real reason of your failure.”

“Thank God for books and music and things I can think about.”

“But time to think? If you’re not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can’t think of anything else but the danger, then you’re playing some game or sitting in some room where you can’t argue with the four wall televisor. Why? The televisor is ‘real.’ It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be, right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn’t time to protest, ‘What nonsense!‘”

Free thinkers at seventeen!

“While dressing or shaving or getting breakfast, say aloud a few such remarks as the following: ‘I believe this is going to be a wonderful day. I believe I can successfully handle all problems that will arise today. I feel good physically, mentally, emotionally. It is wonderful to be alive. I am grateful for all that I have had, for all that I now have, and for all that I shall have. Things aren’t going to fall apart. God is here and He is with me and He will see me through. I thank God for every good thing.‘”

“Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture. . . . Do not build up obstacles in your imagination.”

“Any fact facing us is not as important as our attitude toward it, for that determines our success or failure. The way you think about a fact may defeat you before you ever do anything about it. You are overcome by the fact because you think you are.”

“Do not complain. Make every effort to change things you do not like. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution.”

“Now think deeply. What have you done with your life over the past year? How do you feel inside?”

“The Taliban could take our pens and books, but they could not stop our minds from thinking.”

″‘Well,’ he thought, ‘I suppose I’m lucky to be alive at all.‘”

“Mr. Fox had not spoken for a long time. He had been sitting quite still, his eyes closed, not even hearing what the others were saying. Mrs. Fox knew that he was trying desperately to think of a way out. And now, as she looked at him, she saw him stir himself and get slowly to his feet.”

“Mr. Fox looked at the four Small Foxes and he smiled. What fine children I have, he thought. They are starving to death and haven’t had a drink for three days, but they are still undefeated. I must not let them down.”

“At twelve I had already known how to think for at least four years. In teaching me independence of thought, they had given me the greatest gift an adult can give to a child besides love, and they had given me that also.”

“First with the head and then with the heart.”

“Your brain, Peekay, has two functions; it is a place for original thought, but also it is a reference library. Use it to tell you where to look, and then you will have for yourself all the brains that have ever been.”

“We don’t have the luxury of thinking ... Some people make all the decisions for us.”

“Whenever you think you can or think you can’t, either way you are right.”

“When obedience to God contradicts what I think will give me pleasure, let me ask myself if I love Him.”

“Meditation does not involve trying to change your thinking by thinking some more. It involves watching thought itself.”

“If you work hard enough, assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.”

“The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.”

“The greater part of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly influenced by his instincts, and forced into definite channels.”

“What you think you are is a belief to be undone.”

“I stood in that room for a long time, watching the sunlight and listening to the sounds on the street outside. I stood there, tasting the room and the sunlight and the sounds, and thinking of the long hospital ward. . . Somehow everything had changed. I had spent five days in a hospital and the world around seemed sharpened now and pulsing with life.”

“She always camouflaged herself as a crowd. I’ve never been lonely, she said, but sometimes it’s hard to think above the noise.”

“Is there a lot of stuff you don’t understand? she said & I said pretty much the whole thing & she nodded & said that’s what she thought, but it was nice to hear it anyways and we sat there on the porch swing, listening to the wind & growing up together.”

“I was just getting ready to stick my tongue out at them; but then I thought about what Miss Franny said, about war being hell, and I thought about what Gloria Dump said, about not judging them too hard. And so I just waved instead.”

“Seasons is a wise metaphor for the movement of life, I think. It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real.”

“Think about it: what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellow men. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone.”

“My mom did what school didn’t. She taught me how to think.”

“A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting. ”

“It’s just that it’s fearsome for a man to have a woman start thinking right in front of him. It always leads to trouble.”

“You fell in love with a storm. Did you really think you would get out unscathed?”

“Everything is mental,”

“Instinct is no match for reason.”

“You need to think in Martian to grok the word ‘grok.‘”

“Time is all you have. And you may find one day that you have less than you think.”

“But for some people, the invasive can kind of take over, crowding out all the other thoughts until it’s the only one you’re able to have, the thought you’re perpetually either thinking or distracting yourself from.”

“The Christmas presents once opened are Not So Much Fun as they were while we were in the process of examining, lifting, shaking, thinking about, and opening them.”

“I think, therefore I am... confused.”

“You need not cry very loud: He is nearer to us than we think.”

“Often, in the beginning, you will think that you are wasting time, but you must go on, be determined and persevere in it until death, despite all the difficulties.”

“I think all it really takes for different people to get along is a common rooting interest and a few beers.”

“I did everything I could to avoid being alone or having too much time to think.”

“I think, if you touch me, your hand might fall off or something. Worse things have happened to people who have touched me.”

“My mother used to hope that I would rise up from my humble roots. Become someone sucessful, or even famous. I’m famous all right, but I don’t think it’s what she had in mind.”

“As a person thinks, feels, and believes, so is the condition of his or her mind, body, and circumstances.”

″ ‘Can it think?’ ‘Not only can it think, but it can reason and compromise,’ said the Creator.”

“What you see reflects your thinking, and your thinking but reflects the choice of what you want to see.”

“Men think more about returning home than about leaving.”

“A culture of discipline is not a principle of business, it is a principle of greatness.”

“Our mind is powerful. Think Bigger. Dream bigger. Act bigger – and you’ll live a much bigger version of your life!”

“You don’t need to have it all before you start, you don’t need to know everything, you don’t need to understand fully how it works and you don’t need to be sure or assured of the future.”

“Small thinking keeps small businesses small”

“It cost nothing to think bigger than you are, BUT cost a fortune to think less of yourself.”

“And as she looked at him she began to smile, for though she had not said a word, he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him. He could not deny it. And smiling she looked out of the window and said (thinking to herself, Nothing on earth can equal this happiness)—”

“A significant portion of what we call reality was shaped by human effort.”

“This is how I think of us, when I remember our nights at Troy: Achilles and I beside each other, Phoinix smiling and Automedon stuttering through the punch lines of jokes, and Briseis with her secret eyes and quick, spilling laughter.”

“I don’t think about losing because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.” What’s more, he was already laying down his public response to losing the election: It was stolen!”

“If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”

“I have to think that I think it’s always been a horse race between this administration’s temporary political acumen and their completely, utterly, totally bankrupt policies. And they’re coming home to roost. It was always a question of time. These guys aren’t conservative. These guys are radicals.”

″‘I’ll think you’ll find,’ said Dr. Breed, ‘that everybody does about the same amount of thinking. Scientists simply think about things in one way, and other people think about things in others.‘”

“Two important lessons here. This first is that truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking...The second lesson is that in good decision making, frugality matters.”

″ Figure out where you want to go; then work backwards from there.”

“Feminist thinking teaches us all, especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life.”

“Satan’s greatest success is in making people think they have plenty of time before they die to consider their eternal welfare.”

“All I think of ever is that I love you.”

“So take the time to think. Discover your real reason for being here and then have the courage to act on it.”

“And that’s when I know it’s over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it’s the end.”

“And that was how, after twelve years of never thinking for as much as five minutes about myself, I became able finally to muster the nerve, and the strength, to start facing the facts, to think for myself.”

“I just... I caught myself thinking about it over and over. And then I realized that I was simply remembering it as something that was wrong with me. That was the story I was telling myself - that I was somehow inferior. Isn’t that interesting? The past is just a story we tell ourselves.”

“I need to spend some time in my head with this new Simon.”

“His first theory was that if human beings didn’t keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably shriveled up. After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this--“If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.”

“Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”

“Nostalgia is not what it used to be.”

“You can fool everyone else, but you can’t fool your own mind.”

“You want to be adding value as you think about projects and people, not simply reminding yourself they exist.”

“You’ve got to think about the big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction. —Alvin Toffler”

“I have tried to gild war, and to solace myself for the loss of dear and gallant friends, with the thought that a soldier’s death for a cause that he believes in will count for much, whatever may be beyond this world.”

“Actually, I am a failed anorexic. I have anorexic thinking, but I can’t seem to muster the behavior”

“This is a poem about Percy This is a poem about more than Percy. Think about it.”

“Everything you’ve told yourself you ought to do, your mind thinks you should do right now.”

“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought. —Henri Bergson”

“Use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them.”

“I think of Sarah. The rest is easy.”

“To admit this would force philosophers to confront the possibility that the physical sciences offer a grossly inadequate view of reality. And since philosophers very much wish to think of themselves as scientists, this would offer them an unattractive choice between changing their allegiances or accepting their irrelevance.”

“But I’d hate to think an angel couldn’t sing a little better than that.”

“Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. Suffering follows an evil thought as the wheels of a cart follow the oxen that draws it.”

“I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming lothed to me.”

“Group drinkards maaks grope thinkards.”

“You mustn’t think of the Universe as a wilderness. It hasn’t been that for billions of years,” he said. “Think of it more as... ..cultivated.”

“Ants occupy the same landscape that we do. They have plenty to do, things to occupy themselves. On some level they’re very well aware of their environment. But we don’t try to communicate with them. So I don’t think they have the foggiest notion that we exist.”

“Ants occupy the same landscape that we do. They have plenty to do, things to occupy themselves. On some level they’re very well aware of their environment. But we don’t try to communicate with them. So I don’t think they have the foggiest notion that we exist.”

“The mind feasts on what it focuses on. What consumes my thinking will be the making or the breaking of my identity.”

“Failure is an inside job. So is success. If you want to achieve, you have to win the war in your thinking first.”

“Jeez, I have to go, I have to go and stand up there, and nobody laughs, and you think , you think I .... I don’t mean to take it out on you. You’re suh - suffering enough, being married to a loser.”

“I’ve been thinking lately. About you and me. About what’s going to happen to us, in the end. We’re going to kill each other, aren’t we? Perhaps you’ll kill me. Perhaps I’ll kill you. Perhaps sooner. Perhaps later.”

″ Men of his type so dread all deliberation that they glory in the practice of the instantaneous decision. They think they are saving themselves from irresolution; in reality they are sparing themselves the contemplation of all the consequences of their acts.”

“We, too, need that kind of support to give us strength in our spiritual core. That means we must tightly surround ourselves with truth and not allow for anything other than the truth to enter into our thinking or situation. ”

“At last Maddie sat up in bed and pressed her forehead tight in her hands and really thought. This was the hardest thinking she had ever done. After a long, long time she reached an important conclusion. She would never stand by and say nothing again.”

“Now she had so much to think about as she chewed the grass, looking so pretty in a colored straw hat with streamers!”

“Brian he once had an English teacher, a guy named Perpich, who was always talking about being positive, thinking positive, staying on top of things.”

“Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the THINKS you can think up if only you try!”

“You can think up some birds. That’s what you can do. You can think about yellow or think about blue.”

“He thought he had the most splendid time in the Gardens, and to think you have it is almost quite as good as really to have it.”

“Upon an island hard to reach, the East Beast sits upon his beach. Upon the west beach sits the West Beast. Each beach beast thinks he’s the best beast. Which beast is the best?... Well, I thought at first that the East was best and the West was worst. The I looked again from the west to the east and I like the beast on the east beach beast.”

“Think of black water. Think up a white sky. Think up a boat. Think of BLOOGS blowing by.”

“She turns her thinker-upper on. She lets it softly purr. It thinks up friendly little things with smiles and fuzzy fur.”

“There are so many THINKS that a thinker can think!”

“Sometimes I stare boredly into space, thinking utterly of nothing. This makes Mrs. Wilberton very irritated. I get on her nerves. I know this because she is always telling me I do. To be honest, Mrs. Wilberton is not my favorite person on the planet of Earth. Unfortunately, I am from Earth and she is my teacher.”

″ ‘I think I’m afraid of everything,’ he said.”

“THINK! You can think any THINK that you wish... Think a race on a horse on a ball with a fish!”

“Think! Think a ship. Think up a long trip. ”

“I had so many troubles, I just couldn’t think!”

“Think! Think! Think! That boy will think himself into an early grave...”

“Sometimes I stare boredly into space, thinking utterly of nothing. This makes Mrs. Wilberton very irritated. I get on her nerves. I know this because she is always telling me I do. To be honest, Mrs. Wilberton is not my favorite person on the planet of Earth. Unfortunately, I am from Earth and she is my teacher.”

“And why is it so many things go to the Right? You can think about THAT until Saturday night.”

“Think! Think and wonder. Wonder and think. How much water can fifty-five elephants drink?”

“You can think about red. You can think about pink. You can think up a horse. Oh, the THINKS you can think!”

“Later, after Clarice dumps a bowl of spaghetti on her brother’s head, her mother advises her to think before she acts, and this young queen of the quick comeback responds, “And she’s right. If I’d thought about it I would have put tapioca down his shorts.”

“Everybody knows the story of the Three Little Pigs. Or at least they think they do. But I’ll let you in on a little secret. Nobody knows the real story, because nobody has ever heard My side of the story”

“They sat and they thought (all owls think a lot)- ‘I think we should all sit on my branch,’ said Sarah. And they did, all three together.”

“The baby owls thought (all owls think a lot)- ‘I think she’s gone hunting,’ said Sarah. ‘To get us our food!’ said Percy. ‘I want my mummy! said Bill”

“But Gary was already thinking about that very question. In fact, right at that moment, he asked the TV viewers what name they would choose.”

Henry always felt out of step with the world around him. When everyone looked up, he looked down. If he thought it was going to be a sunny day, it usually rained.

“One night Elmer couldn’t sleep for thinking, and the think that he was thinking was that he was tired of being different.”

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

″‘If people fainted because of too much thinking I’d scarcely ever be conscious,’ Tabitha began at once. ‘I think and think all the time, and I’ve never fainted-not once.‘”

“And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.”

“Thinking about history makes me wonder how I’ll fit into it one day, I guess. And you too. I kinda wish people still wrote like that. History, huh? Bet we could make some.”

“Maybe, I am thinking, there is something hidden like this, in all of us. A small gift from the universe waiting to be discovered.”

“Miro pondered what she was thinking. Did she suspect that she would die before this incident was over? Has she seen through Artkin’s lies, even though he lied to skillfully?”

You must never think of the whole street at once, understand? You must only concentrate on the next step, the next breath, the next stroke of the broom, and the next, and the next. Nothing else. That way you enjoy your work, which is important, because then you make a good job of it. And that’s how it ought to be.

“I’ve gotta think before I act,”

“I like thinking big. I always have. To me it’s very simple: if you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big. Most people think small, because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning. And that gives people like me a great advantage.”

“Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.”

“Most of us take pride in our knowledge and expertise, and in staying true to our beliefs and opinions. That makes sense in a stable world, where we get rewarded for having conviction in our ideas. The problem is that we live in a rapidly changing world, where we need to spend as much time rethinking as we do thinking.”

“Riding the train gives him too much time to think, he has decided. Too much thinking can ruin you.”

“Thursday February 12th. Lincoln’s birthday. I found my mother dyeing her hair in the bathroom tonight. This has come as complete shock to me. For thirteen and three-quarter years I have thought I had a mother with red hair, now I found out that it is really light brown. My mother asked me no to tell my father. What a state their marriage must be in!”

“Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking.

“In the heavenly kingdom, maybe all the dead people turn into angels with wings... Some people don’t think that God exists. They think that it’s just black when you die, and that’s it. Lots of people think black seems pretty boring. They might hope that it becomes blue instead.”

“And yet isn’t it strange, I though that day. Mamma never comes with me. Doesn’t she ever think it might be dangerous? Hasn’t she seen how wild and isolated is out there? No, that was the point. She’d never seen it. All of sudden two thoughts were colliding in my head.”

“Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. ‘Childlikeness’ has to be restored...”

“I couldn’t stop thinking how easy it would be to fall.”

“Don’t be an ‘if’ thinker, be a ‘how’ thinker,”

“For a moment they sat thinking about it, and about what would have happened if they had travelled to Germany.”

“I think you must be the best person in the world...you are always doing good, aren’t you? -- and thinking about other people. Dearest says that is the best kind of goodness; not to think about yourself, but to think about other people. That is just the way you are, isn’t it?”

Along the way to Akeyo’s village, Handa contemplates which fruit Akeyo will like the best. However, each time Handa thinks about a certain fruit an animal pops along and takes that particular fruit.

″‘If you were mine-’ Mark had been saying this to himself since the first night he had stopped to see Ben. He often lay in bed thinking of it before going to sleep.”

After the painter kills himself, leaving a note that does little to explain why he does not want to live any longer, Claudio can naturally think of nothing else except the infernal “Why?”

“He’s starting to get on my nerves, the wolf thinks to himself. For the last two hours the boy has been standing. in front of the wire fencing, as still as a frozen tree, watching the wolf walking.”

″‘Oh, Teddy Robinson,’ said Deborah, ‘don’t think so loud- I can’t hear myself chalking.‘”

“He continued to think, not the lazy meandering thoughts of one about to fall asleep, but exact and definite thoughts.”

“The man lay awake for a while, thinking about the days ahead and of the animals, for the sheer misery in the young dog’s eyes haunted him.”

“She was trying not to be frightened in her mind, and she found that that sort of waiting and thinking really keep a person quite busy.”

“A longing caressed him, and it was so sharp that he wanted to cry to get it out of his breast. He lay down in the green grass near the round tub at the brush line. He covered his eyes with his crossed arms and lay there a long time, and he was full of a nameless sorrow.”

“She never did or said anything without first thinking how ‘Her Grace’ would have said or done it. As the duchess’s sayings and doings had been rather a bore, Aunt Rebecca’s were too.”

“Then she went over to her own little corner of the garden for a ‘think’, for she still could not make up her mind which of all those nice things to do.”

″‘I can think a little bit, too,’ said Kat. ‘Can’t I go?’ ‘No,’ said Vrouw Vedder. ‘Girls shouldn’t think much. It isn’t good for them. Leave thinking to the men.‘”

“I have anxiety. I have no other type of thinking available.”

“Psychologists have been intensely interested for several decades in the two modes of thinking evoked by the picture of the angry woman and by the multiplication problem, and have offered many labels for them.”

“Philip says, ‘I think.’ I say, ‘I am thinking.’ Philip says, ‘What is five plus six?’ ‘It is eleven,’ I say. ‘And the lesson is over.”

“Now don’t talk while I think.”

I shall have to go a fast Thinking Walk by myself. Bother!

He saw so much, and yet somehow it was all out of focus. It was like looking at an opal, and discovering with every movement of it some new colour, some new gleam of light reflected, and yet never really seeing the opal as a whole.

“I had many bright thoughts in my bath this morning,” began Antony. “The brightest one of all was that we were being damn fools, and working at this thing from the wrong end altogether.”

“The moment I understand it there will no longer exist a telegraph for me; it will be nothing more than a sign from M. Duchâtel, or from M. Montalivet, transmitted to the prefect of Bayonne, mystified by two Greek words, têle, graphein. It is the insect with black claws, and the awful word which I wish to retain in my imagination in all its purity and all its importance.”

“A familiar phenomenon,” interposed Zossimov, “actions are sometimes performed in a masterly and most cunning way, while the direction of the actions is deranged and dependent on various morbid impressions—it’s like a dream.”

Yesterday a man said to me that what a man needs is fresh air, fresh air, fresh air. I mean to go to him directly to find out what he meant by that.”