All that we are is the result of what we have thought... If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him... If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.--Buddha
All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.--Thomas J. Watson
All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience.--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.--Henri Frederic Amiel
As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.--Albert Schweitzer
Associate reverently, and as much as you can, with your loftiest thoughts.--Henry David Thoreau
Attitude precedes service. Your positive mental attitude is the basis for the way you act and react to people. 'You become what you think about' is the foundation of your actions and reactions. What are your thoughts? Positive all the time? How are you guiding them?--Jeffrey Gitomer (Your Achievement Ezine - Issue No. 138)
Being intelligent is not a felony, but most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor.--Lazarus Long
The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up and does not stop until you get into the office.--Robert Frost
Change your thoughts and you change your world.--Norman Vincent Peale
A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.--Jiddu Krishnamurti
Deliberate often - decide once.-- Latin Proverb
The direction of a man's thought is always the decisive factor in his personality. His whole outer life will be determined by the inward inclination of his mind.--Erich Sauer
A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.--Albert Szent-Gyorgi
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.--Archibald MacLeish
Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.-–Ray Bradbury
Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg, by the side of which more will be laid.--Henry David Thoreau
Effective thinking consists of being able to arrive at the truth; truth being defined as that which exists.--Calvin S. Hall
Every thought is a seed. If you plant crab apples, don't count on harvesting Golden Delicious.--Bill Meyer
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.--John Dewey
Good thoughts bear good fruit, bad thoughts bear bad fruit.--James Allen
A great many people mistake opinions for thought.--Herbert V. Prochnow
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. - William James
Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great things are done by people who think great thoughts and then go out into the world to make their dreams come true.--Ernest Holmes
Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind.--Emily P. Bissell
Habits of thinking need not be forever. One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals can choose the way they think.--Martin Seligman (Learned Optimism)
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.--Marcus Aurelius
How we think shows through in how we act. Attitudes are mirrors of the mind. They reflect thinking.--David Joseph Schwartz
The human mind prefers to be spoon-fed with the thoughts of others, but deprived of such nourishment it will, reluctantly begin to think for itself and such thinking, remember is original thinking and may have valuable results.--Agatha Christie (The Moving Finger)
I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.--Socrates (from The Quotable Teacher, comp. by Howe)
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.--Galileo Galilei
If the processes don't transfer, they cannot even be called thinking. They can be called learning, memory, or habit, but not thinking. The purpose of a course on thinking is to enhance student's abilities to face new challenges and to attack novel problems confidently, rationally and productively.--Marilyn Jager Adams
If we are not responsible for the thoughts that pass our doors, we are at least responsible for those we admit and entertain.--Charles B. Newcomb
If we understood the power of our thoughts, we would guard them more closely. If we understood the awesome power of our words, we would prefer silence to almost anything negative. In our thoughts and words we create our own weaknesses and our own strengths. Our limitations and joys begin in our hearts. We can always replace negative with positive.--Betty J. Eadie
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.--C. S. Lewis
If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think.--Clarence Darrow
If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you. If you really make them think they'll hate you.--Donald Robert Perry, Marquis
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.-–Haruki Murakami
If you're going to think anyway, you might as well think big.--Donald Trump (Time)
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.--Sir William Lawrence Bragg (in Beyond Reductionism by Koestler and Smithies)
Isn’t it strange some people make You feel so tired inside, Your thoughts begin to shrivel up Like leaves all brown and dried!
But when you’re with some other ones It’s stranger still to find Your thought as thick as fireflies All shiny in your mind!--Rachel Field ("Some People")
It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.--Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency)
It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.--James Thurber
It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical: At such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious than gold. Indeed, people must not be deprived of the right to think their own thoughts.--Boris Yeltsin
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.--Rene Descartes
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.-- Aristotle
Jesus liberated us from religion. Jesus taught simple religious practices over major theorizing.… The only thoughts Jesus told us to police were our own: our own negative thoughts, our own violent thoughts, our own hateful thoughts-not other people's thoughts.--Richard Rohr (adapted from Jesus as Liberator/Paul as Liberator)
Learn from others, but don't allow them to do your thinking for you. That's your job. And your reward.--Ralph Marston
Let your thoughts meander towards a sea of ideas.--Leo D. Minnigh
Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head.--Mark Twain
A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes.--Mohandas K. Gandhi (Ethical Religion)
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.--Victor Hugo
A man is not what he thinks he is, but what he thinks, he is.--Max R. Hickerson
A man would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket and write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable, and should be secured, because they seldom return.--Francis Bacon
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth--more than ruin--more even than death… Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. 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
The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.--Carson McCullers
The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.--Colin Wilson
The mind is like a sheet of white paper in this, that the impressions it receives the oftenest, and retains the longest, are black ones.--Julius C. Hare
The mind, properly controlled, can do just about everything. You can think your way through adversity, you can think your way through problems. It is a superpowerful instrument which so few use to maximum. And if the mind thinks with a believing attitude one can do amazing things.--Norman Vincent Peale
Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic.--Edward de Bono (Serious Creativity)
My clearest recollection of a long-ago interview with Thomas A. Edison is of a single sentence that was painted and hung on a wall in his room. In effect, the sentence was, "It is remarkable to what lengths people will go to avoid thought." That is tragically true. Some of think, more of us think we think, and most of us don't even think of thinking. The result is a somewhat cockeyed world.--Channing Pollack
My thoughts are my company; I can bring them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them.--Walter Savage Landor
No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking.--Voltaire
Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.--Lorraine Hansberry
Nuture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.--Benjamin Disraeli
The only place where your dream becomes impossible is in your own thinking.--Robert H. Schuller
The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory.--Paul Fix
Our life is what our thoughts make it.--Marcus Aurelius
Our minds work like a garden. It is fertile ground that accepts any and everything we plant. Good or evil, constructive or destructive, our lives will bear the fruit of the seeds we plant in our minds.--Ivanla Vanzant
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.--Soren Kierkegaard
People don't ask for facts in making up their minds. They would rather have one good, soul-satisfying emotion than a dozen facts.--Robert Keith Leavitt
People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too.--Christopher Morley
People who are able to do their own thinking should not allow others to do it for them.--Elbert Hubbard
The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language.--J. Michael Straczynski
Rarely do we find men who willingly to 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 L. King, Jr.
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.--Christopher Morley
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.--John Locke
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.--B. F. Skinner (Contingencies of Reinforcement)
Sloppy thinking gets worse over time.--Jenny Holzer
The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.--Marcus Aurelius Antonius
Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.--Marcus Aurelius
Take advantage of the ambiguity in the world. Look at something and think what else it might be.--Roger von Oech
Teaching causes people to go into situations from which they cannot escape, except by thinking. Do not handicap children by making their lives easy.--Robert Heinlein (from The Quotable Teacher, comp. by Howe)
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.--Hannah Arendt
There are some days I practice positive thinking, and other days I'm not positive I am thinking.--John M. Eades
These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as: "I see where I can make an annual cut of $3.47 in my meat budget." But they have no slow, big ideas.--Brenda Ueland
Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try.-–Dr. Seuss
Think positively and masterfully, with confidence and faith, and life becomes more secure, more fraught with action, richer in achievement and experience.--Captain Edward V. Rickenbacker
Think wrongly if you please, but in all cases, think for yourself.--Charles Seymour
Thinking before taking actions is useful only if you are going to take action, otherwise you are wasting time and insulting your mind.--Amit Kalantri
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
Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.--Henry Ford
Thinking is the talking of the soul with itself.--Plato
Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.--Lord Byron (adapted)
Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike? May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion? Without all doubt, we may. Herein all the children of God may unite, notwithstanding these smaller differences.--John Wesley
Thought means life, since those who do not think do not live in any high or real sense.--A. B. Alcott
Time is of no account with great thoughts. They are as fresh today as when they first passed through their author's minds ages ago.--Samuel Smiles
Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man, but they don't bite everybody.--Stanislaw J. Lec
To begin to think with purpose, is to enter the ranks of those strong ones who only recognize failure as one of the pathways to attainment.--James Allen
To think is to differ.--Clarence Darrow (speech at the Scopes trial, 1925)
To think too long about doing a thing often becomes its undoing.--Eva Young
The uncommon man is merely the common man thinking and dreaming of success in larger terms and in more fruitful areas.--Melvin Powers
We are shaped by each other. We adjust not to the reality of a world, but to the reality of other thinkers.--Joseph Chilton Pearce
We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make our world.--Buddha
We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions.--Isaac Bashevis Singer
We must dare to think 'unthinkable' thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world. We must learn to welcome and not to fear the voices of dissent. We must dare to think about 'unthinkable things' because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.--James W. Fulbright
We must preserve our right to think and differ.--Eleanor Roosevelt
We owe most of our great inventions and most of the achievements of genius to idleness - either enforced or voluntary. The human mind prefers to be spoon-fed with the thoughts of others, but deprived of such nourishment it will, reluctantly, begin to think for itself - and such thinking, remember, is original thinking and may have valuable results.--Agatha Christie
We think so because other people think so, Or because--or because--after all, we do think so, Or because, we were told so, and we must think so, Or because we once thought so, and think we still think so, Or because having thought so, we think we will think so.--Henry Sidgwick
We understand that you can't transform people who don't have internal drive and desire to create. But we also know it doesn't work to urge people to think outside the box without giving them the tools to climb out.--Laurie Dunnavant
What is the hardest task in the world? To think.--Ralph Waldo Emerson (Journals)
What luck for the rulers that men do not think.--Adolph Hitler
When all think alike, no one is thinking very much.--Walter Lippmann
When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.--A. A. Milne (The House at Pooh Corner)
Whenever we pride ourselves upon finding a newer, stricter way of thought or exposition … we lose something of the ability to think new thoughts. And equally, of course, whenever we rebel against the sterile rigidity of formal thought and exposition and let our ideas run wild, we likewise lose. As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of lose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science.--Gregory Bateson ("Culture Contact and Schismogenesis" in Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology)
Whoever makes it a rule to test action by thought, thought by action, cannot falter, and if he does, will soon find his way back to the right road.--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things.--Bertrand Russell
Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.--John Maynard Keynes
The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.--Albert Einstein
The world is exactly like you think it is, and that's why.--John A. Woods
You can't stop people from thinking - but you can start them.--Frank Dusch
You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken--unspeakable!--fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse--a little tiny mouse!--of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.--Winston Churchill
Your silent thoughts are like the roots of a plant. They remain hidden in the dark recesses of the earth, but from them stems the whole plant--its life and form, its strength and beauty. From them and through them the plant lives and dies. So, too, your thoughts, although hidden, are your real, vital force.--Lawrence G. Lovasik (The Hidden Power of Kindness)