Thoughts on Thinking

 

If you have a favorite quote about thinking, send it to us at arendt@bard.edu.

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“Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

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“Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international
reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.”

— George Bernard Shaw

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“I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes
and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t
occurred to me to put them down.”

-Georgia O'Keeffe

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“Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution.
It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.”

— Niels Bohr

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“Thinking is like loving and dying.  Each of us must do it for himself.”

— Josiah Royce

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"We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake."

-Christopher Hitchens

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"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

— Alice Walker

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My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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No amount of energy will take the place of thought. A strenuous life with its
eyes shut is a kind of wild insanity.

-Henry Van Dyke

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Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking
that makes what we read ours.

- John Locke

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"Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid.  Thought is great and swift and
free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man."

-Bertrand Russell

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"At a certain age some people's minds close up; they live on their intellectual fat."

-William Lyon Phelps

"Ours is the age which is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to."

-Howard Mumford Jones

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“For the first time she could see a man's head naked of its skull. Saw the cunning
thoughts race in and out through the caves and promontories of his mind long
before they darted through the tunnel of his mouth.”

-Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

"Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten but they may start a winning game."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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"...thinking consists in knowing that the objective world is in reality, a subjective world, that it is the objectifcation of the subject."

-Herbert Marcuse

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"At learning's fountain it is sweet to drink.
But, 'tis a nobler privilege to think."

-John Godfrey Saxe

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"Truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking."

-Malcolm Gladwell

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"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought. "

-Albert Szent-Györgyi

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"Learning  how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think."

-David Foster Wallace

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 "The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking."

 -A. A. Milne

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"The man with a new idea is a crank - until the idea succeeds."

-Mark Twain

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Those who don't like thinking should at least rearrange their prejudices from time to time.

- Luther Burbank

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"Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man.  But they don't bite everybody."

-Stanislaw Lec

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“Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.”

― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

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 “Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”

― Voltaire

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"Thinking isn't agreeing or disagreeing. That's voting."

-Robert Frost

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"Knowledge is no guarantee of good behavior,but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of
bad behavior."

-Martha Nussbaum

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"The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.”

― Horace Walpole

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 “Thinking is itself, however, an adventure.”

― James V. Schall

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“Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is immediately before us.”

-Georg Hegel

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“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 Pratchett

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"He who thinks little, errs much."
-Leonardo Da Vinci

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“To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”

― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

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“Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.”

-Confucius

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“Let us reflect, if we wish to be brilliant. Too much improvisation empties the mind in a stupid way. Running beer gathers no froth. No haste, gentlemen.”

― Victor Hugo

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“No brain at all, some of them [people], only grey fluff that's blown into their heads by mistake, and they don't Think.”

― A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

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"The book to read is not the one that thinks for you but the one which makes you think.”

― Harper Lee

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"No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.”

-Voltaire

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"Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next."

-Jonas Salk

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 “Upon the cunning loom of thought we weave our fancies, so and so.”

-Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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"The worst day in a man's life is when he sits down and begins thinking about how he can get something for nothing."

-Thomas Jefferson

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"Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together."

-Georg Christophe Lichtenberg

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"Think like a man of action, and act like a man of thought."

-Henri Bergson

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"Men who borrow their opinions can never repay their debts."

-George Savile, Marquess de Halifax

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“To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.”

-Henry David Thoreau

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"Great thoughts, like great deeds, need no trumpet."

-Philip James Bailey

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"But if thought is to become the possession of many, not the privilege of the few, we must have done with fear. It is fear that holds men back — fear lest their cherished beliefs should prove delusions, fear lest the institutions by which they live should prove harmful, fear lest they themselves should prove less worthy of respect than they have supposed themselves to be."

 -Bertrand Russell

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“If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.”

― Harlan Ellison

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"My assumption is that thought itself arises out of incidents of living experience and must remain bound to them as the only guide posts by which to take its bearings."

-Hannah Arendt

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“A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labour and an invisible labour.”

-Victor Hugo

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"One thought fills immensity."

-William Blake

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“A library is thought in cold storage.”

-Henry Samuel

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The aim of education should be to teach us how to think, rather than what to think.

-James Beattie

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“Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.”

-Thomas Edison

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"Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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"When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon."

-Thomas Paine

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"Think before you speak. Read before you think."

-Fran Lebowitz

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"If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking."

-George Patton

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“Poirot," I said. "I have been thinking."
"An admirable exercise my friend. Continue it.”
― Agatha Christie, Peril at End House

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"I am neither bitter nor cynical but I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking."

-Franklin Roosevelt

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"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. "

-Søren Kierkegaard

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" We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."

-Albert Einstein

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“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”

-Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

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"One must think with the body and the soul or not think at all."

-Hannah Arendt

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"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

-Aristotle

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“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”

-George Eliot, Middlemarch

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'Your business as thinkers is to make plainer the way from something to the whole of things; to show the rational connection between your fact and the frame of the universe."

-Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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"Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too."

-Voltaire

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"Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think."

-Martin Luther King

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"The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that

we are still not thinking."

-Martin Heidegger

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"Thinking men cannot be ruled."

-Ayn Rand

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"Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."

-William James

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"Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself."

-Plato

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"A man who does not think for himself, does not think at all."

-Oscar Wilde

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"...you don't have to be Al Capone to transgress-you just have to think."

- Phillip Roth, from I Married a Communist