Famously Said Random quote

Quotes about thinking

552 quotes from 279 people

Most readBy personPage 23 of 37

In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumour that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by the group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other group can say.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963
Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963The Abolition of Man (1943), Ch. I: “Men without Chests”
- Intelligence
For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.
C. S. Lewis1898–1963“Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare”, in Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939)
- Truth & Lies
Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.
Abraham Lincoln1809–1865The Lyceum Address (1838)
- Genius
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.
Abraham Lincoln1809–1865
- Ideas
- Reading
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.
Abraham Lincoln1809–1865Lincoln’s Second Annual Message to Congress (1862)
- Change
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
Walter Lippmann1889–1974The Stakes of Diplomacy (1915), Ch. IV: “The Line of Least Resistance”, p. 51
I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.
John Locke1632–1704An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Book 1, Ch. 3, sec. 3
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
John Locke1632–1704An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Dedicatory epistle, as quoted in
- 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
It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism.
H. P. Lovecraft1890–1937“The Temple”—Written 1920; first published in Weird Tales, 6 No. 3 (September 1925)
- Anti-Religion
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
H. P. Lovecraft1890–1937The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
- Knowledge
Ideas are like fish.
If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.
David Lynch1946–2025Catching the Big Fish (2006), Introduction, p. 1
- Ideas
The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is — not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself.
George MacDonald1824–1905The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
- Education
There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first is excellent, the second good, and the third useless.
Niccolò Machiavelli1469–1527
- Intelligence