Thinking Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

We cannot see without thinking; we cannot think without seeing.

Albert Einstein

I'm thinking only of my illness and my health, though both, the first as well as the second, are you.

What's drinking?
A mere pause from thinking!

By over-all planning, we mean planning which takes into consideration the interests of the 600 million people of our country. In drawing up plans, handling affairs or thinking over problems, we must proceed from the fact that China has a population of 600 million people, and we must never forget this fact.

I saw a muskrat come out of a hole in the ice... While I am looking at him, I am thinking what he is thinking of me. He is a different sort of man, that's all.

Henry David Thoreau

In fact, it comes to this: nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. For really to think about someone means thinking about that person every minute of the day, without letting one's thoughts be diverted by anything- by meals, by a fly that settles on one's cheek, by household duties, or by a sudden itch somewhere. But there are always flies and itches. That's why life is difficult to live.

But what is a thinking thing? It is a thing that doubts, understands, [conceives], affirms, denies, wills, refuses, that imagines also, and perceives. Assuredly it is not little, if all these properties belong to my nature.

René Descartes

Advertising signs: they con you into thinking you're the one That can do what's never been done That can win what's never been won Meantime life outside goes on all around you

Speak to me as to thy thinkings,
As thou dost ruminate, and give thy worst of thoughts
The worst of words.

William Shakespeare

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

The development of general ability for independent thinking and judgment should always be placed foremost, not the acquisition of special knowledge.

Albert Einstein

Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical.

Most thinkers write badly, because they communicate not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of them.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry. Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.

Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive. Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of the world as we know it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking.

Albert Einstein

The main objective is to learn to think crudely. Crude thinking is the great one's thinking.

Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.

Henry David Thoreau

To be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious of our own existence.

Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.

To Christoph Martin Wieland in April 1811

Arthur Schopenhauer

When you're first thinking through an idea, it's important not to get bogged down in complexity. Thinking simply and clearly is hard to do.

Richard Branson

Today we must abandon competition and secure cooperation. This must be the central fact in all our considerations of international affairs; otherwise we face certain disaster. Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars.

Albert Einstein

He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The human mind prefers to be spoon-fed with the thoughts of others, but deprived of such nourishment it will, reluctantly, begin to think for itself - and such thinking, remember, is original thinking and may have valuable results.

Agatha Christie

There is one living spirit prevalent over this world, (subject to certain contingencies of organic matter & chiefly heat), which assumes a multitude of forms each having acting principle according to subordinate laws. — There is one thinking sensible principle (intimately allied to one kind of organic matter—have & which thinking principle seems to be given a assumed according to a more extended relations of the individuals, whereby choice with memory or reason? is necessary—which is modified into endless forms bearing a close relation in degree & kind to the endless forms of the living beings.

And what does really matter? That is easy: thinking and doing, doing and thinking—and these are the sum of all wisdom.... Both must move ever onward in life, to and fro, like breathing in and breathing out.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe