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"Great minds think alike."
-Anon.
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You cannot escape the results of your thoughts. Whatever your present environment may be, you will fall, remain or rise with your thoughts, your vision, your ideal. You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspiration.
-James Allen, source: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/james_lane_allen.html
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“The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lighthouses of the mind, with their outward resemblance to less pure symbols. The gateway to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness. One false step, one slurred syllable together reveal a man's thoughts.”
-Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant
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Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is the myth of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular!
-Honore de Balzac, Illusions perdues
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Whatever failures I have known, whatever errors I have committed, whatever follies I have witnessed in private and public life have been the consequence of action without thought.
-Bernard Baruch
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It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us unintelligibly, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.
-Jean Baudrillard
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“Thinking about sense-objects Will attach you to sense-objects; Grow attached, and you become addicted; Thwart your addiction, it turns to anger; Be angry, and you confuse your mind; Confuse your mind, you forget the lesson of experience; Forget experience, you lose discrimination; Lose discrimination, and you miss life's only purpose; [Miss life's only purpose, and you think about sense-objects.]”
-Bhagavad Gita
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Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't "try" to do things. You simply "must" do things.
-Ray Bradbury
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"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world."
-Buddha
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Perhaps we should comprehend these things better were it not for the persistence of the superstition that human beings habitually think. There is no more persistent superstition than this. Linnæus helped it on to an undeserved permanence when he devised the name Homo sapiens for the highest species of the order primates. That was the quintessence of complimentary nomenclature. Of course human beings as such do not think. A real thinker is one of the rarest things in nature. He comes only at long intervals in human history, and when he does come, he is often astonishingly unwelcome. Indeed, he is sometimes speedily sent the way of the unfit and unprotesting earthworm. Emerson understood this, as he understood so many other of the deep things of life. For he wrote: “Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk.”
The plain fact is that man is not ruled by thinking. When man thinks he thinks, he usually merely feels; and his instincts and feelings are powerful precisely in proportion as they are irrational. Reason reveals the other side, and a knowledge of the other side is fatal to the driving power of a prejudice. Prejudices have their important uses, but it is well to try not to mix them up with principles.
The underlying principle in the widespread and ominous revolt of the unfit is that moral considerations must outweigh the mere blind struggle for existence in human affairs.
-Nicholas Murray Butler, "The Revolt of the Unfit" from 'Why Should We Change Our Form of Government', 1912
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"The empires of the future are the empires of the mind."
-Sir Winston Churchill
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Thinking is another attribute of the soul; and here I discover what properly belongs to myself. This alone is inseparable from me. I am -- I exist: this is certain; but how often? As often as I think; for perhaps it would even happen, if I should wholly cease to think, that I should at the same time altogether cease to be. I now admit nothing that is not necessarily true: I am therefore, precisely speaking, only a thinking thing, that is, a mind, understanding, or reason, -- terms whose signification was before unknown to me. I am, however, a real thing, and really existent; but what thing? The answer was, a thinking thing. The question now arises, am I aught besides? I will stimulate my imagination with a view to discover whether I am not still something more than a thinking being. Now it is plain I am not the assemblage of members called the human body; I am not a thin and penetrating air diffused through all these members, or wind, or flame, or vapour, or breath, or any of all the things I can imagine; for I supposed that all these were not, and, without changing the supposition, I find that I still feel assured of my existence.
-Rene Descartes, "The Nature of the Human Mind" from 'Meditations on First Philosophy', 1641
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"Minds are like parachutes; they work best when open."
-Lord Thomas Dewar
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"Nurture your mind with great thoughts."
-Benjamin Disraeli
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"We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality."
-Albert Einstein
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Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
-Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923
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For a long time, I have been trying to see if it would be possible to describe the history of thought as distinct both from the history of ideas (by which I mean the analysis of systems of representation) and from the history of mentalities (by which I mean the analysis of attitudes and types of action [schémas de comportement]). It seemed to me there was one element that was capable of describing the history of thought—this was what one could call the problems or, more exactly, problematizations. What distinguishes thought is that it is something quite different from the set of representations that underlies a certain behavior; it is also quite different from the domain of attitudes that can determine this behavior. Thought is not what inhabits a certain conduct and gives it its meaning; rather, it is what allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and to question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its goals. Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem.
Translated by Lydia Davis and published in volume 1 “Ethics” of “Essential Works of Foucault”, The New Press 1997. Copyright Paul Rabinow
-Michel Foucault, Interview, May 1984, to the question "What is a history of problematics?"
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"The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office."
-Robert Frost
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Thought, like all potent weapons, is exceedingly dangerous if mishandled. Clear thinking is therefore desirable not only in order to develop the full potentialities of the mind, but also to avoid disaster.
-Giles St. Aubyn
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All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience.
-Johann von Goethe
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Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography.
quoted by Thoreau in Walden "Conclusion"
-William Habbington, from "To My Honoured Friend Sir Ed. P. Knight"
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Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion – in the long run, these are the only people who count.
-Robert A. Heinlein
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"Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin."
-Hermann Hesse
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“If I supply you with a thought, you may remember it and you may not. But if I can make you think a thought for yourself, I have indeed added to your stature.”
-Elbert Hubbard
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You can lead a boy to college, but you cannot make him to think.
-Elbert Hubbard
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"What a peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call 'thought'."
-David Hume
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The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity.
-Søren Kierkegaard
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"When all men think alike, no one thinks very much."
-Walter Lippmann
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"I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts."
-John Locke
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I have condemned Khomeini's fatwa to kill Salman Rushdie as a breach of international relations and as an assault on Islam as we know it in the era of apostasy. I believe that the wrong done by Khomeini towards Islam and the Muslims is no less than that done by the author himself. As regards freedom of expression, I have said that it must be considered sacred and that thought can only be corrected by counter-thought. During the debate, I supported the boycott of the book as a means of maintaining social peace, granted that such a decision would not be used as a pretext to constrain thought.
-Naguib Mahfouz, Al-Ahram, March 2, 1989
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No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead.
-John Stuart Mill
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"Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts."
-José Ortega y Gasset, What Is Philosophy? (New York: W. W. Norton), 1960
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"Thinking: The talking of the soul with itself."
-Plato
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"The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled."
-Plutarch
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"A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking."
-Jerry Seinfeld
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I believe in an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.
-Arthur Hays Sulzberger
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As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
-Henry David Thoreau
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Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Ch. 18 "Conclusion"
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Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
-James Thurber
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Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.
-Paul Ambroise Valery
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All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.
(founder of IBM)
-Thomas J. Watson
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A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of one's neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him.
-Oscar Wilde, The soul of man under Socialism (essay), 1891
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"The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merely to grasp the world, but to change it."
-Colin Wilson
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If you can control a man's thinking, you do not have to worry about his actions. 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.
-George G. Woodson
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Books about Thought
