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Quotes about thinking

552 quotes from 279 people

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The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.
W. H. Auden1907–1973Forewords and Afterwords (1973), “The Protestant Mystics”
- Intelligence
God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there’s no turning back.
Gloria Steinem1934–2026Moving Beyond Words (1994), Part 6: Doing Sixty, p. 270
Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.
Jean Cocteau1889–1963Diary of an Unknown (1988)
- Ideas
Let us overthrow the totems, break the taboos. Or better, let us consider them cancelled. Coldly, let us be intelligent.
Pierre Trudeau1919–2000Approaches to Politics (1970)
- Change
- Intelligence
People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.
Blaise Pascal1623–1662De l’Art de persuader [“On the Art of Persuasion”], written 1658; published posthumously.
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
Terry Pratchett1948–2015Diggers (1990)
- Comedy
Just as we cannot stop the movement of the heavens, revolving as they do with such speed, so we cannot restrain our thought.
Teresa of Ávila1515–1582Fourth Mansions, Ch. 1, trans. E. Allison Peers (1961), p. 58–59
Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.
Graham Greene1904–1991The Human Factor (1978), Pt. III, ch. 3 (1978)
- Enemies
- Intelligence
A thinking man’s greatest happiness is to have fathomed what can be fathomed and to revere in silence what cannot be fathomed.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1749–1832Maxims and Reflections (1833), Maxim 1207, trans. Stopp (p153)
- Happiness
The measure of greatness in a scientific idea is the extent to which it stimulates thought and opens up new lines of research.
Paul Dirac1902–1984The scientific work of Georges Lemaître (1968), P.A.M
- Ideas
- Science
Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.
Annie Besant1847–1933Annie Besant: An Autobiography (1893), p. 357; 3rd edition (1908), p. 357
- Knowledge
People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around — the music and the ideas.
Bob Dylanborn 1941The Guardian (13 February 1992)
- Ideas
- Music
Knowing others is intelligence;
knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.
LLaozi580–501 BCTao Te Ching, Ch. 33, tr. Stephen Mitchell (1988)
We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.
Niels Bohr1885–1962Said to Wolfgang Pauli at Columbia University (1958), as reported by Freeman Dyson, ‘Innovation in Physics’, Scientific American (September 1958)
- Ideas
- Science
The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and … each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.
Carl Jung1875–1961Contributions to Analytical Psychology (1928), p. 340