Quotes About Thinking

Strategic thinking requires the ability to contemplate possibilities that are not immediately present.

There is skill in all things, even in making porridge. Dry bread at home is better than curried prawns abroad. Eating and drinking should not keep men from thinking. Better a small fish than an empty dish. Let not your tongue cut your throat. I

The only problems that have simple solutions are simple problems. The only managers that have simple problems have simple minds. […] Complex problems do not have simple solutions.

There's only the writing, which I admit to knowing very little about. But then it's probably best not to know. It allows one to work without expectation. Best to let the poem do the thinking while we concern ourselves with what's called the personal life.

It is easy to raise a laugh, but dangerous, for it is the greatest test of an orator's control of his audience to be able to land them again on the solid earth of sober thinking.

Cynicism is the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence.

I seem to remember sitting on a golden bench, and she started chattering about the sunset, or something. She seemed quite happy so I let her get on with it. Then she got hold of my hand and asked me what I was thinking about. So I said, "The treatment of anal fistulae".

The more relaxed your mind is, the more at peace you'll be, the better your mind will function, the more clear your thinking will be.

And what makes humans so sure that thinking is the most important activity in the universe?...I on the contrary have never forgotten that first I existed and then, with a lot of difficulty, I learned to think." (p. 31)

The only thing you can do is to stop attaching importance to your own ways of thinking and feeling, your thought patterns, your emotions, and your opinions. Don't attach any importance to them. Then your limitations will become weaker and weaker and one day collapse.

Your ability to respond is the way you are. Only your ability to act is connected with the outside world. Responsibility is not about talking, thinking, or doing. Responsibility is about being. That's the way life is—not an independent, self-contained bubble but a moment-to-moment dialogue with the universe. You don't have to work at making it that way. You just have to see it the way it is.

Have you come into this world to experience life or to think about it? Your mental process is a very small happening compared to the life process, but right now it has become far more important.

People are incredibly violent and inflict tremendous pain without even thinking about it. what's really scary is that, to them, violence has no meaning. They aren't being cruel; they are being machines.

A human being has close kinship with the whole human race -- not a bond of blood or seed, but a community of mind. And you have forgotten this too, that every man's mind is a god and has flowed from that source; that nothing is our own property, but even our child, our body, our very soul have come from that source; that all is as thinking makes it so; that each of us lives only the present moment, and the present moment is all we lose.

Take pleasure in one thing and rest in it, in passing from one social act to another social act, thinking of God.

60. An arrow has one motion and the mind another. Even when pausing, even when weighing conclusions, the mind is moving forward, toward its goal. 61. To enter others' minds and let them enter yours.

All is as thinking makes it so. Your mind will take on the character of your most frequent thoughts: souls are dyed by thoughts.

To change your mind and defer to correction is not to sacrifice your independence; for such an act is your own, in pursuance of your own impulse, your own judgement, and your own thinking.

There are two features that are common to the minds of gods, men, and any other rational beings there may be: they are immune to external obstruction, and what they count as good is right thinking and right action, which they make the limit of their desire.

Sed nescio quo modo nihil tam absurde dici potest quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosphorum. (There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.)

Metaphor is a way of thought long before it is a way with words.

Oblivion is increasingly attractive to the young, and even to the middle-aged, since why retain your brain when no amount of thinking can even begin to solve the problem?

Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake's view. Next they'd be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war.

What could she have been thinking about? Not much, I guess; not back then, not at the time. She was thinking about how not to think. The times were abnormal. She took pride in her appearance. She did not believe he was a monster. He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, offkey, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.