Quotes About Thinking

My father taught me a lot, Elphaba said slowly. He was very well educated indeed. He taught me to read and write and think, and more. But not enough. I just think, like our teachers here, that if ministers are effective, they're good at asking questions to get you to think. I don't think they're supposed to have the answers. Not necessarily.

Space is an arena where the rowdy particles that are the building blocks of life perform their antics. All spring, things fall; the general law of increasing disorder is on the rise. What is it to be a cause without an effect, an effect without a cause, to abandon time-bound thinking, the use of tenses, the temporally related emotions of impatience, expectation, hope, and fear? But I can't. At the edge of the lake I watch ducks. Like them, my thinking rises and falls on the same water.

Certainly solitude is dangerous for active minds. We require around us men who can think and talk. When we are alone for a long time, we people space with phantoms.

Man is so used to thinking visually that I almost forgot the darkness and pictured the endless corridor of wood and glass in its low-studded monotony as though I saw it.

All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.

You philosophers are sages in your maxims, and fools in your conduct.

Bad ideas offer explanations of experience that do not reflect reality. They read into life what is not there. Often we embrace invalid ideas because they have not been clearly stated and therefore cannot be evaluated. In our culture, influenced as it is by mass media, we are bombarded by ridiculous concepts that are deliberately left vague so we will act without thinking.

Thinking is difficult, but it stands as our essential work. Make no mistake about the difficulty of the task. It is often slow, discouraging, overwhelming. But when God calls us to preach, he calls us to love him with our minds. God deserves that kind of love and so do the people to whom we minister.

Act – make an event. Smash the coordinates and see where the smithereens fly. Let in the madness, and be sure to be a danger to oneself and others. Too much thinking turns you into that fool Hamlet.

Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company.

To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.

For the need to think can never be stilled by allegedly definite insights of "wise men"; it can be satisfied only through thinking, and the thoughts I had yesterday will satisfy this need today only to the extent that I want and am able to think them anew.

The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.

Seuls ceux qui sont amoureux de la sagesse auraient envie de penser. Cela revient à une tautologie décevante. Pour être apte à penser, il faudrait aimer la beauté et la justice et donc avoir une âme bonne. Le monde serait divisé en bons et en méchants sans qu'on sache pourquoi. Cette division, c'est exactement ce que nous ne cherchions pas. Dès lors il faut reprendre l'analyse.

A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence – it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

Menselijke wezens zijn per definitie verdacht, op grond van hun vermogen om te denken, en deze verdenking kan niet afgewend worden door voorbeeldig gedrag, want het menselijk vermogen om te denken is ook het vermogen om zich te bedenken.[...]De volgende beslissende stap is [...] de moord op de morele persoon in de mens. Dit gebeurt hoofdzakelijk door het martelaarschap onmogelijk te maken.

far beyond the boundaries within which race-thinking and class-thinking have developed into obligatory patterns of thought, free public opinion has adopted them to such an extent that not only intellectuals but great masses of people will no longer accept a presentation of past or present facts that is not in agreement with either of these views.

who actually believe that men in think tanks are thinkers and that computers can think;

Uma vida sem pensamento é totalmente possível, mas ela fracassa em fazer desabrochar sua própria essência – ela não é apenas sem sentido; ela não é totalmente viva. Pessoas que não pensam são como sonâmbulos [...] Em nome de interesses pessoais, muitos abdicam do pensamento crítico, engolem abusos e sorriem para quem desprezam. Abdicar de pensar também é crime.

On politics] And a people that can no longer believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

Some habits of ineffectiveness are rooted in our social conditioning toward quick-fix, short-term thinking.

There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.

Romance, like the rabbit at the dog track, is the elusive, fake, and never attained reward which, for the benefit and amusement of our masters, keeps us running and thinking in safe circles.