Quotes About Thinking

Si algunos hombres eligen no pensar o no trabajar, sólo pueden sobrevivir (temporalmente) saqueando los bienes producidos por otros; pero esos otros tuvieron que producirlos, o nadie habría sobrevivido.

Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think. Don't ignore your own desires... Don't sacrifice them. Examine their cause.

Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say 'It is,' you are refusing to say 'I am.

But since the work of man's mind is not automatic, his values, like all his premises, are product either of his thinking or of his evasions: man chooses his values by a conscious process of thought–or accepts them by default, by subconscious associations, on faith, on someone's authority, by some form of social osmosis or blind imitation. Emotions are produced by man's premises, held consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly.

Just as laymen leave medicine to doctors and electronics to engineers, so people who are not qualified to think should leave all thinking to the experts and have faith in the experts' higher authority. Only experts are able to understand the discoveries of modern science, which have proved that thought is an illusion and that the mind is a myth.

Verá, doctor Stadler; a la gente no le gusta pensar, y cuanto mayores son sus conflictos, menos piensa. Pero gracias a cierto instinto, sabe que ha de hacerlo y ello produce una sensación de culpabilidad. Por tal motivo, bendecirá y seguirá a quienquiera que le ofrezca una justificación para no pensar. Alguien que convierta en virtud de gran altura intelectual lo que saben que es su pecado, su debilidad y su miseria.

I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind—and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.

Thinking is something one doesn't borrow or pawn.

Many professors use the Argument from Intimidation to stifle independent thinking among the students, to evade questions they cannot answer, to discourage any critical analysis of their arbitrary assumptions or any departure from the intellectual status quo.

Every man is free to rise as far as he is able or willing, but it's only the degree to which he thinks that determines the degree to which he'll rise.

Since everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort, the two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being are: thinking and productive work.

all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind

don't you see that the essential error is the same? Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.

The most important result of the encounter [in the preceding anecdote] is the scholar's startling discovery of the roundness of the earth . . . Instinctively realizing the connection between the foreigner's presence, the roundness of the earth, and future changes and upheavals, he finally announces, Yes, the earth is round, the women will start to think, and as soon as they begin to think, they will become shameless.

Every now and then I find myself thinking of something my daughter told me when she was in medical school: one sign that a patient is dying is that she feels no pain.

We're up against the conventional thinking that says your ability to lead as president comes from longevity in Washington or proximity to the White House. But we know that real leadership is about candor and judgment and the ability to rally Americans from all walks of life around a common purpose, a higher purpose.

More than anything, though, my fascination with India had to do with Mahatma Gandhi. Along with Lincoln, King, and Mandela, Gandhi had profoundly influenced my thinking.

I had discovered that writing--with whatever instrument--was a powerful aid to thinking, and thinking was what I now resolved to do.

What do you do when confronted with an inexplicable and alarming situation? Well, you can panic or give in to some other tyrannical emotion, like dread. Or you can escape into a book or a puzzle or, judging from the adults around me, a bottle of gin. But there is another possible response to the unknown and potentially menacing, and that is thinking.

Dalam keadaan tertekan, wanita berbicara tanpa berpikir, sedangkan laki-laki bertindak tanpa berpikir. Tak heran 90% penghuni penjara sedangkan laki-laki dan 90% pengunjung terapis adalah perempuan.

I was impressed, although unsurprised. She was obviously in the habit of thinking operationally, and was as matter-of-fact about it as she was effective. I'd already concluded she was trained. To that assessment I now added a probable minimum of several years of field experience.

Up there in that room, as I see it, is the reading and the thinking-through, a theory of rivers, of trees moving, of falling light. Here on the river, as I lurch against a freshening of the current, is the practice of rivers. In navigating by the glow of the Milky Way, the practice of light. In steadying with a staff, the practice of wood.

Exposure to an unusually spectacular place in conducive circumstance, the thinking goes, can release one from the prison of one's own ego and initiate a renewed awareness of the wondrous, salutary, and informing nature of the Other, the thing outside of the self.

Most of us think about empathy as a "feeling" or an "emotion." It is. To be empathetic is to be able to feel what the other person is feeling. But empathy is more than just a feeling. In order to be able to feel what another person is feeling, you need to be able to see the world as that other person sees it. This ability to take the perspective of another demands perception and imagination. Empathy thus reflects the integration of thinking and feeling.