thinking one

Rarely do we find men who willingly to engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.
--Martin L. King, Jr.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.--Christopher Morley

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.--John Locke

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.--B. F. Skinner (Contingencies of Reinforcement)

Sloppy thinking gets worse over time.--Jenny Holzer

The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.--Marcus Aurelius Antonius

Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.--Marcus Aurelius

Take advantage of the ambiguity in the world. Look at something and think what else it might be.
--Roger von Oech

Teaching causes people to go into situations from which they cannot escape, except by thinking. Do not handicap children by making their lives easy.
--Robert Heinlein (from The Quotable Teacher, comp. by Howe)

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

There are some days I practice positive thinking, and other days I'm not positive I am thinking.
--John M. Eades

These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as: "I see where I can make an annual cut of $3.47 in my meat budget." But they have no slow, big ideas.--Brenda Ueland

Think wrongly if you please, but in all cases, think for yourself.--Charles Seymour

Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.--Henry Ford

Thinking is the talking of the soul with itself.--Plato

Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.--Lord Byron (adapted)

Thought means life, since those who do not think do not live in any high or real sense.--A. B. Alcott

Time is of no account with great thoughts. They are as fresh today as when they first passed through their author's minds ages ago.--Samuel Smiles

Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man, but they don't bite everybody.--Stanislaw J. Lec

To begin to think with purpose, is to enter the ranks of those strong ones who only recognize failure as one of the pathways to attainment.--James Allen

To think is to differ.--Clarence Darrow (speech at the Scopes trial, 1925)

To think too long about doing a thing often becomes its undoing.--Eva Young

The uncommon man is merely the common man thinking and dreaming of success in larger terms and in more fruitful areas.--Melvin Powers

We are shaped by each other. We adjust not to the reality of a world, but to the reality of other thinkers.
-Joseph Chilton Pearce

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make our world.
--Buddha

We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions.
-Isaac Bashevis Singer

We must dare to think 'unthinkable' thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world. We must learn to welcome and not to fear the voices of dissent. We must dare to think about 'unthinkable things' because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.--James W. Fulbright

We must preserve our right to think and differ.--Eleanor Roosevelt

We owe most of our great inventions and most of the achievements of genius to idleness - either enforced or voluntary. 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

We think so because other people think so,
Or because--or because--after all, we do think so,
Or because, we were told so, and we must think so,
Or because we once thought so, and think we still think so,
Or because having thought so, we think we will think so.
--Henry Sidgwick

We understand that you can't transform people who don't have internal drive and desire to create. But we also know it doesn't work to urge people to think outside the box without giving them the tools to climb out.--Laurie Dunnavant

What is the hardest task in the world? To think.--Ralph Waldo Emerson (Journals)

What luck for the rulers that men do not think.--Adolph Hitler

When all think alike, no one is thinking very much.--Walter Lippmann

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.          --A. A. Milne (The House at Pooh Corner)

Whenever we pride ourselves upon finding a newer, stricter way of thought or exposition … we lose something of the ability to think new thoughts. And equally, of course, whenever we rebel against the sterile rigidity of formal thought and exposition and let our ideas run wild, we likewise lose. As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of lose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science.
--Gregory Bateson ("Culture Contact and Schismogenesis" in Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology)

The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things.--Bertrand Russell

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.
--John Maynard Keynes

You can't stop people from thinking - but you can start them.--Frank Dusch

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken--unspeakable!--fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse--a little tiny mouse!--of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.
--Winston Churchill

Your silent thoughts are like the roots of a plant. They remain hidden in the dark recesses of the earth, but from them stems the whole plant--its life and form, its strength and beauty. From them and through them the plant lives and dies. So, too, your thoughts, although hidden, are your real, vital force.
--Lawrence G. Lovasik (The Hidden Power of Kindness)