Quotes About Thinking

Truth,' Hegel says, is seen as the end of thought. It is revealed where thought attains its telos, which is something to be determined by thinking itself. The truth is not something external to thought to which it may correspond and which would allow the possibility of the skeptical question, but is rather the immanent goal thought is itself directed towards…

You spend your life so worried about what others think, when in reality, people mostly don't think. On the few occasions when they do, true, it is often something bad, but one has to at least admire the fact that they're thinking at all.

The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play).

A critique does not consist in saying that things aren't good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based... To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy.

For the first time in my life I'd started thinking about God, seriously imagining that there could be a kind of Creator of the universe observing everything I did, and my first reaction was uncomplicated, pure and simple fear.

It is ultimately annoying to live in the middle of a period of mediocrities – especially when one feels incapable of raising the level. I doubt if I will produce any new philosophy; I think I would already have given some signs of this at my age; but I am pretty sure that I would produce better novels if the thinking around me were a little more inspiring.

La conciencia de un determinismo integral era sin duda lo que más claramente nos diferenciaba de nuestros antepasados humanos. Como ellos, no éramos sino máquinas pensantes; pero a diferencia de ellos, teníamos conciencia de ser tan sólo máquinas.

God, she was a fool. What had she expected him to do? To think? Hi, you hate me, you put your head through five mirrors to make that point, so I was thinking...

Three months! I'm not sure he's even a member. What was Arne thinking? A search committee is no place for a rank newcomer." Nor, probably—guilt pang—a drifting old-timer.

Love Thinking, thinking thus, loving thus, there is no sleep, I see him, we meet, to be woken from that dream that is suffering indeed.

The good things in life do not come only through the senses. Some of the most exhilarating experiences we undergo are generated inside the mind, triggered by information that challenges our ability to think, rather than from the use of sensory skills.

But even when there is nothing else pressing occupying their minds, most people fall far below the peak capacity for processing information. In the roughly one-third of the day that is free of obligations, in their precious "leisure" time, most people in fact seem to use their minds as little as possible.

But a person who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free. His thinking will be directed by the opinions of his neighbors, by the editorials in the papers, and by the appeals of television. He will be at the mercy of "experts.

By learning to concentrate, a person acquires control over psychic energy, the basic fuel upon which all thinking depends.

DrugÄ… przyczynÄ… szaleÅ"stwa byÅ'y rozmyÅ›lania. Ojciec prosiÅ' mnie usilnie, bym nie zaczÄ…Å' myÅ›le? zbyt du?o, najlepiej jedynie o tym, co najpotrzebniejsze, poniewa? rozmyÅ›lanie byÅ'o zÅ'ym nawykiem, który z upÅ'ywem lat tylko siÄ™ pogÅ'Ä™bi, im wiÄ™cej czasu siÄ™ mu poÅ›wiÄ™caÅ'o.

As I said, as indeed Orwell said, there is unproductive vagueness, but there is also dried out precision. We need both ways of thinking. Vagueness and precision, wide focus and narrow.

Family on mission is how we stop thinking of discipleship as a task that we do and start living out discipleship as a way that we are.

Pluto was part of their mental landscape, the one they had constructed to organize their thinking about the solar system and their own place within it. Pluto seemed like the edge of existence. Ripping Pluto out of that landscape caused what felt like an inconceivably empty hole.

Grief sends your thinking into all kinds of weird places. It makes you come up with all sorts of strange rules.

My dad saw hockey as almost an improvement on soccer. My British relatives would say, 'But, Eric, football is the thinking-man's game.' My dad would say, 'True. But, hockey is a fast thinking-man's game.

Aristotle defined a first principle as "the first basis from which a thing is known." First principles thinking is therefore the art of breaking a problem down to the fundamental parts that you know are true and building up from there.

You can lead a man to Congress, but you can't make him think.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make 'em think.

No life is a waste," the Blue Man said. "The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we're alone.