Famously Said Random quote

Quotes about thinking

552 quotes from 279 people

Most readBy personPage 13 of 37

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
John Steinbeck1902–1968Interview with Robert van Gelder (April 1947), as quoted in John Steinbeck: A Biography (1994) by Jay Parini
- Ideas
Government resting upon the will and universal suffrage of the people has no anchorage except in the people’s intelligence.
Grover Cleveland1837–1908At the celebration of the sesquicentennial of Princeton College (October 22, 1896).
- Democracy
- Intelligence
When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world.
Robin Wall Kimmererborn 1953Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), p. 258
- Ideas
There is nothing that comes closer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to feel pride in one’s intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it.
Simone Weil1909–1943Simone Weil: An Anthology (1986), p. 35
- Intelligence
- Pride
Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.
F. Scott Fitzgerald1896–1940Notebook E, edited by Edmund Wilson (1945)
- Genius
The march of the human mind is slow.
Edmund Burke1729–1797Second Speech on Conciliation with America (1775)
Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.
Buckminster Fuller1895–1983Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects of Humanity (1969)
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
Thomas Mann1875–1955The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 6
- Debate
- Ideas
Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.
Bertrand Russell1872–1970Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918), Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
Oscar Wilde1854–1900The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde, edited by Alvin Redman (1954)
- Ideas
There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we cherish breath and power in our own living.
Audre Lorde1934–1992Learning from the 60s
- Ideas
Reason is like an officer when the King appears;
The officer then loses his power and hides himself.
Reason is the shadow cast by God; God is the sun.
Rumi1207–1273IV, Story 4 (tr. Whinfield)
- God
There is no sin except stupidity.
Oscar Wilde1854–1900The Critic as Artist (1891), Part II
- Intelligence
The best ideas are common property.
Seneca the Younger5 BC–AD 65Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XII: On old age, Line 11.
- Ideas
- Quotations
Cynicism is only intellectual sloth.
Henry Rollinsborn 1961Riff on life’s journey blends humor, hope, Columbus Dispatch