Quotes About Thinking

He called his approach non-teleological thinking, or "is thinking." The term non-teleological was coined by Steinbeck's best friend, Edward F. Ricketts; and as the two men articulated their shared philosophy, they emphasized the need to see as clearly as a scientist: that is, to accept life on its own terms. "Is thinking" focused not on ends but on the process of life, the Aristotelean efficient cause of nature.

It was said that its existence protected decent women. An unmarried man could go to one of these houses and evacuate the sexual energy which was making him uneasy and at the same time maintain the popular attitudes about the purity and loveliness of women. It was a mystery, but then there are many mysterious things in our social thinking.

And just as there was a cleanness about his body, so there was a cleanness in his thinking. Men coming to his blacksmith shop to talk and listen dropped their cursing for a while, not from any kind of restraint but automatically, as though this were not the place for it.

When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God.

I believe one thing powerfully- that the only creative thing our species has is the individual, lonely mind... The group ungoverned by individual thinking is a horrible destructive principle.

I wonder about people who say they haven't time to think. For myself, I can double think. I find that weighing vegetables, passing the time of day with customers, fighting or loving Mary, coping with the children-- none of these prevents a second and continuing layer of thinking, wondering, conjecturing. Surely this must be true of everyone. Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.

Is thinking" focused not on ends but on the process of life

It's always hard to start to concentrate. The mind darts like a chicken, trying to escape thinking even though thinking is the most rewarding function of man.

Without death, now, there couldn't be life. Health," he said with a little smiling roll of his lower lip, "is an animal condition. Now most of our ill-health comes from two places-the brain and the back. We made two mistakes; one was to stand up and the other was to start thinking. It strains the spine and the nerves. It makes tension and the brain makes the body.

It was not that her brain was less efficient than theirs, within its limits it was more so; but it was like the keyboard of an adding machine as opposed to that of typewriters.

not simply cause-and-effect thinking or group comparison thinking but the complexity of human life.

Awareness is not the same as thinking. It is a complementary form of intelligence, a way of knowing that is at least as wonderful and as powerful, if not more so, than thinking.

Another way to look at meditation is to view the process of thinking itself as a waterfall, a continual cascading of thought. In cultivating mindfulness we are going beyond or behind our thinking, much the way you might find a vantagepoint in a cave or depression in a rock behind a waterfall. We still see and hear the water, but we are out of the torrent.

Awareness is not the same as thought. It lies beyond thinking, although it makes use of thinking, honoring its value and its power. Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking, helping us to see and know our thoughts as thoughts rather than getting caught up in them in reality.

It's very important as a beginner that you understand right from the start that meditation is about befriending your thinking, about holding it gently in awareness, no matter what is on your mind in a particular moment. It is not about shutting off your thoughts or changing them in any way.

Meditation is not so concerned with how much thinking is going on as it is with how much room you are making for it to take place within the field of your awareness from one moment to the next.

Meditation does not involve trying to change your thinking by thinking some more. It involves watching thought itself. The watching is the holding. By watching your thoughts without being drawn into them, you can learn something profoundly liberating about thinking itself, which may help you to be less of a prisoner of those thought patterns (….)

Religious fundamentalism, magical thinking and self-delusion, have been justifications for some of the most horrific atrocities in human history.

We need a revolution in development thinking and practice. Foreign aid, debt relief, family planning, democracy, education, and free markets have not succeeded.

When a child is starving, a family may not be able to think about long-term sustainability or damage to ecosystems that support endangered species.

Father doesn't think very sudden, but he thinks awful strong.

Hopeful thinking can get you out of your fear zone and into your appreciation zone.

People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know.

Fear overrides all rational thinking