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Quotes about thinking

552 quotes from 279 people

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Men of the most brilliant intelligence can be born, live and die in error and falsehood.
Simone Weil1909–1943Human Personality (1943), p. 69
- Intelligence
- Truth & Lies
Ignorance and confidence are constant companions.
John McAfee1945–2021Into the Heart of Truth (2001)
- Intelligence
- Knowledge
The idea of a single eureka moment is a dangerous lie. It makes us feel inadequate since we haven’t had ours. It prevents people with seeds of good ideas from getting started.
Mark Zuckerbergborn 1984Harvard Graduation Speech (2017)
- Ideas
It is a failure of human imagination and human arrogance to assume that we will never build things smarter than ourselves.
Sam Altmanborn 1985“The Merge”, blog post (2017)
- Intelligence
- Technology
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
John Maynard Keynes1883–1946The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), Ch. 24, p. 383
- Economics
- Ideas
The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind.
Eckhart Tolleborn 1948The Power of Now (1997)
- Freedom
The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.
Albert Einstein1879–1955Letter to Morris Raphael Cohen, professor emeritus of philosophy at the College of the City of New York, defending the appointment of Bertrand Russell to a teaching position (19 March 1940).
- Courage
- Intelligence
The priceless heritage of our society is the unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think as he will.
Robert H. Jackson1892–1954American Communications Association v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382, 442-43 (1950)
- Freedom
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.
Albert Einstein1879–1955Cosmic Religion: With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931), p. 97
- Ideas
- Knowledge
And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.
John Steinbeck1902–1968East of Eden (1952), Part 2, Ch. 13
- Freedom
Ever since the French revolution there has developed a vicious, cretinizing tendency to consider a genius (apart from his work) as a human being more or less the same in every sense as other ordinary mortals.
Salvador Dalí1904–1989Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 1
- Genius
Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map.
Alan Mooreborn 1953“What Is Reality?” (written for television)
- Ideas
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
Thomas Pynchonborn 1937Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Part 3, Proverbs for Paranoids
- Power
[Hollywood films] tie things up in nice little bows and give you answers, even if the answers are stupid, you go home and you don’t have to think about it. … The great filmmakers make you go home and think about it.
Terry Gilliamborn 1940Interview to TCM comparing the work of Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick (2009)
- Movies
It is only when we think abstractly that we have such a high opinion of man.
Bertrand Russell1872–1970Essay Do We Survive Death? (1936)