Hannah Arendt - Thinking Quotes

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Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing?

Hannah Arendt
Kant... discovered the scandal of reason, that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.

Hannah Arendt
Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.

Hannah Arendt
Thinking, willing, and judging are the three basic fundamental activities. They cannot be derived from each other and although they have certain common characteristics, they cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

Hannah Arendt
It interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop-and-think.

Hannah Arendt
Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company.

Hannah Arendt
Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.

Hannah Arendt
Thinking beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think.

Hannah Arendt
Thinking withdraws radically and for its own sake from this world and its evidential nature, whereas science profits from a possible withdrawal for the sake of specific results.

Hannah Arendt
To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know.

Hannah Arendt
Kant... was also quite aware that "the urgent need" of reason is both different from and "more than mere quest and desire for knowledge." Hence, the distinguishing of the two faculties, reason and intellect, coincides with a distinction between two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing.

Hannah Arendt
Kant... stated defensively that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge... to make room for faith," but he had not made room for faith; he had made room for thought, and he had not "denied knowledge" but separated knowledge from thinking.

Hannah Arendt
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous...

Hannah Arendt
Ideological thinking becomes emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a 'truer' reality concealed behind all perceptible things, dominating them from this place of concealment and requiring a sixth sense that enables us to become aware of it.

Hannah Arendt
The business of thinking... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before.

Hannah Arendt
Men=earthbound creatures, living in communities, endowed with common sense, sensus communis, a community sense; not autonomous, needing each other's company even for thinking ( freedom of the pen )=first part of the Critique of Judgment: aesthetic judgment.

Hannah Arendt