Quotes About Thoughts And Thinking

“The perception of other people and the intersubjective world is problematic only for adults. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him. He has no awares of himself or of others as private subjectives, nor does he suspect that all of us, himself included, are limited to one certain point of view of the world. That is why he subjects neither his thoughts, in which he believes as they present themselves, to any sort of criticism. He has no knowledge of points of view. For him men are empty heads turned towards one single, self-evident world where everything takes place, even dreams, which are, he thinks, in his room, and even thinking, since it is not distinct from words.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“When our thoughts revolve we are so often deceived into supposing that their violent movement is an indication of their vigorous originality, the upheaval of prejudice and fixed ideas, when all the time it is more likely that the machine which contains them is only an elaborate cement-mixer, and when the thinking is finished, those whirling thoughts are smoothed into the unchanged conventional mould and seeing them set solid enough to dance, to build, to travel upon, we would never dream of their first deceit, of the hope once roused by their apparently violent reorganisation ...”

— Janet Frame

“By creating a new mythos - that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave - la mestiza creates a new consciousness. The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject/object duality that keeps her prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war.”

— Gloria E. Anzaldúa

“Instead of eating too much, I'm thinking too much and I need to throw up some of these thoughts before something vile happens.”

— Zoe Trope

“That's how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side a closed door that he's lost the key for. So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well.”

— Walter Mosley

“Was everyone else really as alive as she was? ... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.”

— Ian McEwan

“A poem is a windy city, has broad shoulders
and insistent industry,
barrels into your brain, sticking
its steam-filled, swarmy head
into the delicate, empty bird cages
propped in the rooms of your imagination.
A poem can be rude, downright ignorant
of what you had been thinking about
and holding onto for too much of the day.
More than a city, a poem pushes its hemispheres
against your thoughts, knocking them out
of the windows of your ears.
Every good poem screams, 'Read me
because you're going to die someday!”

— B.J. Ward

“Maybe I had been making a greater monster of him than he really was, or maybe I was still under his influence, for I was certain that he wanted me to believe he was no more than a harmless man who happened to use vampirism to get what he desired. Some remnant of his mesmerism was still upon me. I had never been able to shake the feeling that he was tucked away in a corner of my mind, that he could read my thoughts, know what I was thinking. He had done something to me, but what that was, I had never been able to discover. All I knew was that the feeling had been with me since the morning I woke up and found myself in Venice.”

— Melika Dannese Lux

“Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still.”

— Frederick William Faber

“You are mad to be spending the summer in the country, where the days are too quiet and you have so much time to think. In the city you live on Broadway, where the noise is so thick your scary thoughts can't get a word in edgewise. But here in the county, there is only space. On the stone bridge by the stream. On the mossy rock at the edge of the yard. Behind the abandoned trailer where Art, the old man with the glass eye, used to live. Space, space, space, and you can scare yourself into thinking your thoughts are more like voices.”

— Lena Dunham

“The panic crept closer, accompanied by a niggling doubt. Could she go back to her time? Did she want to? He shoved both thoughts aside forcefully. They were betrothed. It was too late for thinking. A betrothal was as binding as marriage. He could bed her with a clear conscience, sire sons and daughters on her and not call them bastards. She was bound to him and it was a bond she could not break. He would make certain of that. She'd stolen his heart, damn her, and he wouldn't let that go unpunished.”

— Lynn Kurland

“There is no stress in the world, only people thinking stressful thoughts.”

— Wayne W. Dyer

“That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself." But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all." There”

— G.K. Chesterton

“You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles whe na carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself.
Ina man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“Most of the books I have are indicators of my insecurity. I really wanted to be an intellectual. I really wanted to understand Sartre. I thought that was what made people smart. I have tried to read Being and Nothingness no fewer than twenty times in my life. I really thought that every answer had to be in that book. Maybe it is. The truth is, I can't read anything with any distance. Every book is a self-help book to me. Just having them makes me feel better. I underline profusely but I don't retain much. Reading is like a drug. When I am reading from these books it feels like I am thinking what is being read, and that gives me a rush. That is enough. I glean what I can. I finish some of the unfinished thoughts lingering around in my head by adding the thoughts of geniuses and I build from there. There are bookmarks in most of the denser tomes at around page 20 to 40 because that was where I said, "I get it." Then I put them back on the shelf.”

— Marc Maron

“The secret of living a life of excellence is merely a matter of thinking thoughts of excellence. Really, it's a matter of programming our minds with the kind of information that will set us free.”

— Charles R. Swindoll

“New thinking doesn't mean shuffling your old thoughts around; it means getting rid of the old and implementing the new. That way your, "I can't" become "I can!" and "I did!”

— Toni Sorenson

“I had depressing thoughts that the theme, even though I had thought of it, was better than I was as a writer. Henry James or Thomas Mann could easily write it, but not I. 'I'm thinking of writing it from the point of view of someone at the hotel who observes her,' I said, but this did not fill me with much hope. Then my friend, who is not a writer, suggested I try it from the omniscient author's point of view.”

— Patricia Highsmith

“First time since I come to Am'rica, I not with husband or Rekha or in restaurant or store or car or apartment. I's all alone and I loves it. First time I feel everything not borrow. What I mean by that? When I with the husband, I seeing everything through his eyes - moon, sun, sky, tree, parking lot, store, everything. If he feeling sun too hot, I feeling upset. If he cursing the cold, I angry with snow. My brains not thinking my own thoughts.”

— Thrity Umrigar

“From so much self-revising, I've destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I'm now my thoughts and not I”

— Fernando Pessoa

“I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.”

— Joan Didion

“I have about concluded that wealth is a state of mind, and that anyone can acquire a wealthy state of mind by thinking rich thoughts.”

— Andrew Young

“When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there's a 90 second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop.
Something happens in the external world and chemicals are flushed through your body which puts it on full alert. For those chemicals to totally flush out of the body it takes less than 90 seconds.
This means that for 90 seconds you can watch the process happening, you can feel it happening, and then you can watch it go away.
After that, if you continue to feel fear, anger, and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you're thinking that are re-stimulating the circuitry that is resulting in you having this physiological response over and over again.”

— Jill Bolte Taylor

“Concentration is not thinking of one thing. On the contrary, it is excluding all thoughts, since all thoughts obstruct the sense of one's true being. All efforts are to be directed simply to removing the veil of ignorance. Concentrating the mind solely on the Self will lead to happiness or bliss. Drawing in the thoughts, restraining them and preventing them from straying outwards is called detachment (vairagya). Fixing them in the Self is spiritual practice (sadhana). Concentrating on the heart is the same as concentrating on the Self. Heart is another name for Self.”

— Ramana Maharshi

“When our mind works freely without any hindrance, and is at liberty to 'come' or to 'go', we attain Samadhi of Prajna, or liberation. Such a state is called the function of 'thoughtlessness'. But to refrain from thinking of anything, so that all thoughts are suppressed, is to be Dharma-ridden, and this is an erroneous view.”

— Huineng

“Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so. You no longer believe in reality but in thinking. And when you are pushed off the dead end your thoughts go with you and they are of no use to you.”

— Henry Miller

“A foolish German had said that man thought in words. It was totally false; a pernicious doctrine; the thoughts flashed into being in a hundred simultaneous forms, with a thousand associations, and the speaking mind selected one, forming it grossly into the inadequate symbols of words, inadequate because common to disparate situations - admitted to be inadequate for vast regions of expression, since for them there were the parallel languages of music and painting. Words were not called for in many or indeed most forms of thought: Mozart certainly thought in terms of music. He himself at this moment was thinking in terms of scent.”

— Patrick O'Brian

“Speak to me as to thy thinking
As thou dost ruminate, and give thy worst of thoughts
The worst of words ...”

— William Shakespeare

“Thinking these kinds of thoughts, feeling these kinds of feelings, it's more than disloyal. I know that. It's downright traitorous.”

— Jenny Han

“The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts , but that it generates a way of thinking.”

— Samuel R. Delany

“We'll keep you in our thoughts With the other bullshit in your heads? No, keep me out of your thoughts, because I hear some of the stuff you talk about and if that's close to what you're thinking about, I don't want to be around that, so keep me and my family out of your thoughts, unless you're thinking of making me a sandwich.”

— Hannibal Buress

“These days, when people are alone, or feel a moment of boredom, they tend to reach for a device. In a movie theater, at a stop sign, at the checkout line at a supermarket and, yes, at a memorial service, reaching for a device becomes so natural that we start to forget that there is a reason, a good reason, to sit still with our thoughts: It does honor to what we are thinking about. It does honor to ourselves.”

— Sherry Turkle

“There are no idle thoughts. All thinking produces form at some level.”

— Helen Schucman

“The trick to not thinking is not adding energy to the equation in an effort to forcibly stop thinking from happening. It's more a matter of subtracting energy from the equation in order not to barf the thoughts up and start chewing them over again.”

— Brad Warner

“The physical act of meditating by closing one's eyes and slowing down the speed of internal thoughts - especially worrisome thinking - results in a physiological response that is well documented in the scientific literature.”

— Tim McCarthy

“Do not reflect on the meaning of the word; thinking and reflecting must cease, as all mystical writers insist. Simply "sound" the word silently, letting go of all feelings and thoughts.”

— Willigis Jager

“Humility, or poverty of spirit, is not a matter of thinking low thoughts about ourselves. It is not a matter of groveling in the dust. It is simply a matter of knowing ourselves as we really are. And when we see ourselves as we really are, we will see that we are poor.”

— John W. Miller

“I find that the three truly great times for thinking thoughts are when I am standing in the shower, sitting on the john, or walking. And the greatest of these, by far, is walking.”

— Colin Fletcher

“There is nothing wrong with thought and it can be used whenever necessary. But in every moment you can choose to follow your thoughts or you can recognize that which is not thinking. Don't try to stop thinking, let it happen. Just recognize that which is not thinking.”

— Adyashanti

“Creation is always happening. Every time and individual has a thought, or a prolonged chronic way of thinking, they're in the creation process. Something is going to manifest out of those thoughts.”

— Michael Beckwith

“I realize the dominating thoughts of my mind will eventually reproduce themselves in outward, physical action and gradually transform themselves into physical reality, therefore, I will concentrate my thoughts for thirty minutes daily, upon the task of thinking of the person I intend to become, thereby creating in my mind a clear mental picture of that person.”

— Napoleon Hill

“Want to know the secret behind The Secret? The Law of Attraction will not bring you abundance and prosperity for just thinking pleasant, positive thoughts. It is no cosmic mistake that the word "attraction" has the word "action" in it. Abundance is, in fact, the result of creative thinking and a lot of action. Much action, much prosperity, in other words. What are you waiting for?”

— Ernie J Zelinski

“Supreme Court says pornography is anything without artistic merit that causes sexual thoughts, that's their definition, essentially. No artistic merit, causes sexual thoughts. Hmm ... Sounds like ... every commercial on television, doesn't it? You know, when I see those two twins on that Doublemint commercial? I'm not thinking of gum. I am thinking of chewing, so maybe that's the connection they're trying to make.”

— Bill Hicks

“When you do The Work, you see who you are by seeing who you think other people are. Eventually you come to see that everything outside you is a reflection of your own thinking. You are the storyteller, the projector of all stories, and the world is the projected image of your thoughts.”

— Byron Katie

“I want you to know that farmers are not going to be secondary thoughts to a Bush administration. They will be in the forethought of our thinking.”

— George W. Bush