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Quotes about thinking

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Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired.
Jonathan Swift1667–1745Letter to a Young Clergyman (January 9, 1720), on proving Christianity to unbelievers
- Debate
Thought is only a gleam in the midst of a long night. But it is this gleam which is everything.
Henri Poincaré1854–1912The Value of Science (1905), Ch. 11: Science and Reality
By reducing any quality to quantity, myth economizes intelligence: it understands reality more cheaply.
Roland Barthes1915–1980Mythologies (1957), p. 153
Your intelligence often bears the same relation to your heart as the library of a château does to its owner.
Nicolas Chamfort1740–1794Maximes et Pensées, #84
- Intelligence
The disease having been caused by allowing cleverness to displace wisdom, no amount of clever research is likely to produce a cure.
ESE. F. Schumacher1911–1977Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973), p. 35.
- Intelligence
- Wisdom
As a way of maintaining relative intellectual independence, having the attitude of an amateur instead of a professional is a better course.
Edward Said1935–2003Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures, p. 87
Persons without minds are like weeds that delight in good earth; they want to be amused by others, all the more because they are dull within.
Honoré de Balzac1799–1850The Vicar of Tours (1832), Ch. I
- Intelligence
Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.
David Hume1711–1776A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 1: Of the understanding, Part 4, Section 7
- Philosophy
No one can be a great thinker who does not recognise, that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead.
John Stuart Mill1806–1873On Liberty (1859), Ch. II: Of the Liberty of Thought and DiscussionIn context
Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so.
Carl Jung1875–1961Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1960), p. 33
- History
Explore, and explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatise yourself, nor accept another’s dogmatism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882Literary Ethics (1838)
- Advice
If a person is stupid, we excuse him by saying that he cannot help it; but if we attempted to excuse in precisely the same way the person who is bad, we should be laughed at.
Arthur Schopenhauer1788–1860The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2 (trans. E. F. J. Payne), p. 230
- Intelligence
- Morality
Your life doesn’t get any better than your mind is: You might have wonderful friends, perfect health, a great career, and everything else you want, and you can still be miserable.
Sam Harrisborn 1967Sam Harris, Taming the Mind (April 12, 2014)
- Happiness
What the age needs is not a genius — it has had geniuses enough, but a martyr, who in order to teach men to obey would himself be obedient unto death. What the age needs is awakening.
Søren Kierkegaard1813–1855The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s (20 November 1847)
- Genius
Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.
ECEmil Cioran1911–1995The Trouble With Being Born (1973)