No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.
Voltaire
Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.
Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
Edmund Burke
A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
Carl G. Jung
Take time to deliberate; but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in.
Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.
Lorraine Hansberry
Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.
No matter where you go or what you do, you live your entire life within the confines of your head.
Terry Josephson
What we think, we become.
You and I are not what we eat; we are what we think.
Walter Anderson
I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.
Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?
Winnie the Pooh
Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
Soren Kierkegaard
Thinking is the greatest torture in the world for most people.
Too often we… enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
John F. Kennedy
Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.
The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.
Will Durant
Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking
Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won’t come in.
Alan Alda
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
I like to think of thoughts as living blossoms borne by the human tree.
James Douglas
Man’s power of choice enables him to think like an angel or a devil, a king or a slave. Whatever he chooses, mind will create and manifest.
The forceps of our minds are clumsy things and crush the truth a little in the course of taking hold of it.
H.G. Wells
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Our minds are lazier than our bodies.
Francois
Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so.
Invest a few moments in thinking. It will pay good interest.
My thoughts before a big race are usually pretty simple. I tell myself: Get out of the blocks, run your race, stay relaxed. If you run your race, you’ll win… Channel your energy. Focus.
Some people get lost in thought because it’s such unfamiliar territory.
G. Behn
Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
William Shakespeare
Thinking is like loving and dying. Each of us must do it for himself.
Josiah Royce
Nurture your mind with great thoughts; to believe in the heroic makes heroes.
It is well for people who think, to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean.
Luther Burbank
Our subconscious minds have no sense of humor, play no jokes and cannot tell the difference between reality and an imagined thought or image. What we continually think about eventually will manifest in our lives.
Physiological response to thinking and to pain is the same; and man is not given to hurting himself.
Martin H. Fischer
Our thoughts take the wildest flight; even at the moment when they should arrange themselves in
We spend our days in deliberating, and we end them without coming to any resolve.
L’Estrange
Recovering from failure is often easier than building from success.
Our job is not to make up anybody’s mind, but to open minds and to make the agony of the decision-making so intense you can escape only by thinking.
Remember, happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely upon what you think.
Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
Havelock Ellis
The ill effects of thought come about when we forget that thought is a function of our consciousness.. an ability that we as human beings have. We are the producers of our own thinking.
The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
H.L. Mencken
Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once a week.
George Bernard Shaw
…the thoughtful excitement of lonely rambles, of gardening, and of other like occupations, where the mind has leisure to must during the healthful activity of the body, with the fresh and wakeful breezes blowing round it…
Augustus William Hare & Julius Charles Hare
Belief is when someone else does the thinking.
Buckminster Fuller
Noone knows exactly where thought comes from, but it can be said that thought comes from the same place as whatever it is that beats our heart.. it comes from being alive.
Irons rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
Leonardo da Vinci
The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Traditional thinking is all about “what is” Future thinking will also need to be about what can be.
Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man. But they don’t bite everybody.
Stanislaw Lec
Lateral thinking is concerned not with playing with the existing pieces but with seeking to change those very pieces. It is concerned with the perception part of thinking. This is where we organise the external world into the pieces we can then ‘process’.
Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
G.C. Lichtenberg
If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.
The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking.
Albert Einstein
We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible.
Brain, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think.
Ambrose Bierce
We are what we are, because of the vibrations of thought which we pick up and register, through the stimuli of our daily environment.
At a certain age some people’s minds close up; they live on their intellectual fat.
William Lyon Phelps
College totally changed my life. It changed what I believe and what I think about everything. I majored in philosophy.
Thought is the wind, knowledge the sail, and mankind the vessel.
Augustus William Hare & Julius Charles Hare
Always think outside the box and embrace opportunities that appear, wherever they might be.
No amount of energy will take the place of thought. A strenuous life with its eyes shut is a kind of wild insanity.
Henry Van Dyke
Tell your friends not to think aloud
Until they swallow.
Nickelback
Believing is easier than thinking. Hence so many more believers than thinkers.
Bruce Calvert
If you’re thinking of debt, that’s what you’re going to attract.
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor
Victor Hugo
Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.
Sometimes I think and other times I am.
Paul Valery
The man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life in his own.
Few minds wear out; more rust out.
Christian N. Bovee
Opinion is that exercise of the human will which helps us to make a decision without information.
John Erskine
Some people do not become thinkers simply because their memories are too good.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
I don’t claim anything of the work. It is his work. I am like a little pencil in his hand. That is all. He does the thinking. He does the writing. The pencil has nothing to do with it.
Men can live without air a few minutes, without water for about two weeks, without food for about two months – and without a new thought for years on end.
Kent Ruth
Faith is the great cop out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have.
John Locke
I like thinking big. If you’re going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big.
Men who borrow their opinions can never repay their debts.
George Savile
We think about all of our tomorrows, but we don’t know how many there are, so let’s start making the most of our Todays!
A lawyer’s brief will be brief, before a freethinker thinks freely.
Augustus William Hare & Julius Charles Hare
It’s not just the emotional, intellectual, and physical gaps between you and money. The real gap is always between what you think you want and what you actually want, deep down.
Chi Wen Tzu always thought three times before taking action. Twice would have been quite enough.
Confucius
Each moment of our life, we either invoke or destroy our dreams. We call upon it to become a fact, or we cancel our previous instructions.
What luck for rulers, that men do not think.
Adolph Hitler
Doubt is not a pleasant state of mind, but certainty is absurd.
Voltaire
The older I get, the more centered I become and the more I think I really know about myself. What I know is that what other people do doesn’t really have any effect on me.
Thinking is what a great many people think they are doing when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
William James
For those who do not think, it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while.
Luther Burbank
How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.
Niels Bohr
You cannot plough a field by turning it over in your mind.
He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.
William Drummond
Ours is the age which is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.
Howard Mumford Jones
Thinking, or more precisely identification with thinking, gives rise to and maintains the ego, which, in our Western society in particular, is out of control. It believes it is real and tries hard to maintain its supremacy. Negative states of mind, such as anger, resentment, fear, envy, and jealousy, are products of the ego.