Great Throughts Treasury

"Progress is always the product of fresh thinking, and much of it thinking which to practical men bears the semblance of dreaming." - Robert Gordon Sproul

"Style is the essence of thinking." - Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

"We learn to do neither by thinking nor by doing; we learn to do by thinking about what we are doing." - George D. Stoddard

"In the principle of equality I discern two tendencies: the one leading the mind of every man to untried thoughts; the other prohibiting him from thinking at all." -

"No clear-thinking or clear-seeing man or woman can be an apostle of despair. He alone fails who gives up and lies down." - Ralph Waldo Trine

"Men of splendid talents are generally too quick, too volatile, too adventurous, and too unstable to be much relied on; whereas men of common abilities, in a regular, plodding routine of business, act with more regularity and greater certainty. Men of the best intellectual abilities are apt to strike off suddenly, like the tangent of a circle, and cannot be brought into their orbits by attraction or gravity - they often act with such eccentricity as to be lost in the vortex of their own reveries. Brilliant talents in general are like the ignes fatui; they excite wonder, but often mislead. They are not, however, without their use; like the fire from the flint, once produced, it may be converted, by solid, thinking men, to very salutary and noble purposes." - John Trusler

"In our thinking we must preserve an open and enquiring mind, an ability to see things through the eyes of our opponents, a skill for understanding the motives and thoughts of those whom we oppose. Yet we must act in the light of the best knowledge and reason available to us at the moment." - Carleton Washburne

"Thinking consumes." - Chip Weston

"I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thought; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean of the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man - a motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things." - William Wordsworth

"Logical and rational thinking shows us that since it is impossible for a person to save himself from the difficulties and misfortunes of life, it makes sense to accept them with a positive attitude. This ensures a person a happy life." -

"When the political columnists say "Every thinking man" they mean themselves, and when the candidates appeal to "Every intelligent vote" they mean everybody who is going to vote for them." - Franklin Pierce Adams, pen name F.P.A.

"Intellectual and spiritual leaders hailed the cause of civil rights and gave little thought to where the civil disobedience road might end. But defiance of the law, even for the best reasons, opens a tiny hole in the dike and soon a trickle becomes a flood... And while no thinking person denies that social injustice exits, no thinking person can condone any group, for any reason, taking justice into his own hands. Once this is permitted, democracy dies; for democracy is sustained through one great premise: the premise that civil rights are balanced by civil responsibilities." - Spiro T. Agnew, fully Spiro Theodore Agnew

"Prejudice is thinking ill of others without sufficient warrant." - R. C. Allen, fully Robert Cameron Allen

"The universe is but a kaleidoscope which turns within the mind of the so-called thinking being, who is himself a curiosity without a cause, an accident conscious of the great accident around him, and who amuses himself with it so long as the phenomenon of his vision lasts." -

"Time is so fleeting that if we do not remember God in our youth, age may find us incapable of thinking about him." - Hans Christian Anderson

"One universe made up of all that is; and one God in it all, and one principle of being, and one law, the reason shared by all thinking creatures, and one truth." - Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

""Point of view" must mean more than the mere prejudice; it should express conclusions reached by the painful process known as thinking. And when new facts or factors are presented, free men should be as vigilant to change their viewpoints as to confirm them." - Arthur Mortimer Astbury

"It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge." - Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson

"People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know." - Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson

"The central purpose of American education is to prepare man to think and the major challenge facing us today is to keep man thinking." - Milo Bail

"Courage to start and willingness to keep everlastingly at it reaps the requisites for success. Meet the sunrise with confidence. Fill every golden minute with right thinking and worthwhile endeavor. Do this and there will be joy for you in each golden sunset." -

"Unhappiness indicates wrong thinking; just as ill health indicates bad regimen." - Paul Bourget, fully Paul Charles Joseph Bourget

"Thinking is the process that I hold in horror. I have thought for fifty years, with the most ghastly and disastrous results, mostly thoughts of my own, and if I attempt to superpose the thoughts of other people, I find my mental equipment utterly inadequate to the strain." - Gamaliel Bradford

"There is a serious defect in the thinking of someone who wants - more than anything else - to become rich. As long as they don't have the money, it will seem like a worthwhile goal. Once they do, they will understand how important other things are - and have always been." - Joseph Brooks

"Bad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger, which he knows that he was means and made to do because he is still, in spite of it all, the child of God." - Phillips Brooks

"The way we are going to think tomorrow depends largely on what we are thinking today." - David Leslie Brown

"Thinking, for many, is life's most painful activity. For the fortunate others, there's not much in life that approaches it." - Garth Cate

"They who have read about everything are thought to understand everything, but it is not always so; reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections - we must chew them over again." - William Ellery Channing

"If a man harbors any sort of fear, it percolates through all his thinking, damages his personality, makes him landlord to a ghost." - Lloyd C. Douglas, fully Lloyd Cassel Douglas, born Doya C. Douglas

"Only the thinking man lives his life. The thoughtless man's life passes him by." - Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

"There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the real labor of thinking." -

"Thinking is hard work." -

"The aim of education must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals, who, however, see in the service of community their highest life problem." - Albert Einstein

"The school should always have as its aim that the young man leave it as a harmonious personality, not as a specialist. This in my opinion is true in a certain sense even in technical schools.... The development of general ability for independent thinking and judgment should always be placed foremost, not the acquisition of special knowledge." - Albert Einstein

"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking." - Albert Einstein

"There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the real labor of thinking." - Albert Einstein

"Progress in industry depends very largely on the enterprise of deep-thinking men, who are ahead of the time in their ideas." - William Ellis

"Reading should be in proportion to thinking, and thinking in proportion to reading." - Nathaniel Emmons

"Reading should be in proportion to thinking, and thinking in proportion to reading." - Nathanael Emmons, also Nathaniel Emmons

"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." -

"A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking." - Martin Henry Fischer

"Nobody can think straight who does not work. Idleness warps the mind. Thinking without constructive action becomes a disease." - Henry Ford

"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probably reason why so few engage in it.'" - Henry Ford

"To be a success, devote three or four hours a day to being an executive and the rest of the time to thinking." - Felix Frankfurter

"I conceive of God as a verb, not a noun. Intellect manifest in man is to some extent God. God is part of the thinking process of every man." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

"The thinking world is beginning to realize that all the dangers that besiege you can be met with the greatest weapon you possess; your thought and your emotions." - Walter M. Germain

"Negative thinking is depriving people of their natural birthright of health. It is the prime cause in shortening the lives of so many of us. And yet it is so simple to live a healthier, longer and so much happier life. We have only to recognize how God works His wonders through laws governing nature and "human nature."" - Walter M. Germain

"A flippant, frivolous man may ridicule others, may controvert them, scorn them; but he who has any respect for himself seems to have renounced the right of thinking meanly of others." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The greatest happiness of the thinking man is to have fathomed what can be fathomed, and quietly to reverence what is unfathomable." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The mere observing of a thing is no use whatsoever. Observing turns into beholding, beholding to thinking, thinking into establishing connections, so that one may say that every attentive glance we cast on the world is an act of theorizing. However, this ought to be done consciously, with self-criticism, with freedom, and, to use a daring word, with irony." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe