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Quotes about thinking

552 quotes from 279 people

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It is well known to all experienced minds that our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.
George Eliot1819–1880Adam Bede (1859)
Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky1821–1881The Idiot (1868–9), Part 3, Chapter 1 (tr. Constance Garnett, 1913)
- Genius
- Technology
He who thinks little, errs much.
Leonardo da Vinci1452–1519XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
It is by acts, and not by ideas that people live.
Anatole France1844–1924The Literary Life (1888-1892), Series I: Sérénus
- Ideas
Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.
Sigmund Freud1856–1939“New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis” (1933), Anxiety and Instinctual Life (Lecture 32)
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
Robert A. Heinlein1907–1988Time Enough for Love (1973)
- Intelligence
Do not deny the classical approach, simply as a reaction, or you will have created another pattern and trapped yourself there.
Bruce Lee1940–1973Tao of Jeet Kune Do (1975), p. 25
Ideas are everywhere, but knowledge is rare.
Thomas Sowellborn 1930Knowledge and Decisions (1980; 1996), Ch. 1 : The Role of Knowledge
- Ideas
- Knowledge
Why can’t somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.1809–1894The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859), Ch. 6
- Talking
Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.
IDIsaac D'Israeli1766–1848Curiosities of Literature (1791–1834), Solitude.
- Genius
You don’t realize that you’re intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
James Baldwin1924–1987“James Baldwin: Reflections of a Maverick” interview (27 May 1984)
- Intelligence
Reason is Life’s sole arbiter, the magic Laby’rinth’s single clue:
Worlds lie above, beyond its ken; what crosses it can ne’er be true.
Richard Francis Burton1821–1890The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
John Maynard Keynes1883–1946The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), Preface
- Ideas
Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.
John Stuart Mill1806–1873On Liberty (1859), Ch. II: Of the Liberty of Thought and DiscussionIn context
- Truth & Lies
What’s drinking?
A mere pause from thinking!
Lord Byron1788–1824The Deformed Transformed, Act III, sc. i (1824).
- Comedy