Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Thinking

"Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Where a man has a passion for meditating without the capacity of thinking, a particular idea fixes itself fast, and soon creates a mental disease." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Of all intellectual friendships, none are so beautiful as those which subsist between old and ripe men and their younger brethren in science or literature or art. It is by; these private friendships, even more than by public performance, that the tradition of sound thinking and great doing is perpetuated from age to age." - Philip G. Hamerton, fully Philip Gilbert Hamerton

"Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live." - Alexander Herzen

"I had a "near death experience" and remember thinking, "If only people knew what it was like to die, they wouldn't be afraid." I reached a point at which a voice began to ask me if I thought I'd completed what I'd come to do. was I going to leave my son, then age three, behind? There was no sense of threat or coercion. An absolute acceptance that whatever I did was all right, but pointing out that the moment of choice was now. The relief and release from the fear of dying changed my life. The reminder that "I am not my body" freed me to live my life in a different way. The understanding that no matter what is going on in our bodies, the essence of who we are is unaffected; this wisdom has enabled me to help other see their bodies in a different way. To see the body in illness not as an enemy, but as a faithful fried, programmed by; the soul to react in that exact way. To see illness as a confrontation in the physical of what one is reluctant to confront on the mental or emotional levels. In other words, a message, a communication, a time to listen and therefore a unique and powerful opportunity for transformation." - Soozi Holbeche

"When you stop thinking that things have a past or future, and that they come or go, then in the whole universe there won't be a single atom that is not your own treasure. All you have to do is look into your own mind; then the marvelous reality will manifest itself at all times. Don't search for the truth with your intellect. Don't search at all. The nature of the mind is intrinsically pure." - Ta-chu Hui-Hai

"Redundancy of language is never found with deep reflection. Verbiage may indicate observation, but not thinking. He who thinks much, says but little in proportion to his thoughts. He selects that language which will convey his ideas in the most explicit and direct manner. He tries to compress as much thought as possible into a few words. On the contrary, the man who talks everlastingly and promiscuously, who seems to have an exhaustless magazine of sound, crowds so many words into his thoughts that he always obscures, and very frequently conceals them." - Washington Irving

"Everything begins with an idea. Your thoughts are the blueprint for your life. Your thoughts today create your world of tomorrow. Change your thoughts and you will change your world. Through the power of your thinking, you are continuously drawing kinds of events into your life. You have absolute control over your reactions." - Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

"‘The true’, to put it very briefly, is only expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole of course; for what meets expediently all the experience in sight won’t necessarily meet all farther experiences equally satisfactorily." - William James

"The world of our consciousness consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner ‘state’ in which the thinking comes to pass. What we think of may be enormous - the cosmic times and spaces, for example - whereas the inner state may be the most fugitive and paltry activity of the mind. Yet the cosmic objects, so far as the experience yields them, are but ideal pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess but only point outwardly, while the inner state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our experience are one." - William James

"No man can enjoy happiness without thinking that he enjoys it." -

"The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are." -

"It's quicker to act your way into right thinking than to think your way into right acting." - E. Stanley Jones, fully Eli Stanley Jones

"Logic is the art of thinking well: the mind, like the body, requires to be trained before it can use its power in the most advantageous way." -

"There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking." - Alfred Korzybski, fully Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski

"Today the world is the victim of propaganda because people are not intellectually competent. More than anything in the United States needs effective citizens competent to do their own thinking." - William Mather Lewis

"When I'm getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say - and two-thirds thinking about him and what he is going to say." - Abraham Lincoln

"Experience: in that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either about external or sensible objects or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking." - John Locke

"The solution to the problems posed in art do not lie outside in the realms of technique and formula; they reside in the realm of fresh thinking about perennial issues, in honest feelings and awakened spirit." - Peter London

"The trouble with research is that it tells you what people were thinking yesterday, not tomorrow. It’s like driving a car using a rearview mirror." - Bernard Loomis

"It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds." - James Russell Lowell

"To pursue joy is to lose it. The only way to get it is to follow steadily the path of duty, without thinking of joy, and then, like sheep, it comes most surely unsought and we "being in the way," the angel of God, a bright-haired Joy, is sure to meet us." - Alexander Maclaren

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

"Crime rarely fails to make the headlines. How one wishes there were some way of featuring and dramatizing good living and high thinking." - Robert J. McCracken, D.D.

"We have lose the habit of thinking quietly, of trying to know ourselves and our friends, and the world around us, and the God who is above and within us. We are looking in the wrong places for happiness. We are so exclusively occupied with material things and with their accumulation that the higher values are crowded out." - Robert J. McCracken, D.D.

"I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind-that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking. I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

"I never listen to calumnies, because, if they are untrue, I run the risk of being deceived, and if they are true, of hating persons not worth thinking about." - Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu

"Read ever day something no one else is reading. Think something no one else is thinking. It is bad for the mind to be always a part of unanimity." - Christopher Morley, fully Christopher Darlington Morley

"Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. To pray is to make religion." - Novalis, pseudonym of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg NULL

"You must make a habit of thinking in terms of a definite objective." - John Henry Patterson

"Man's great power of thinking, remembering, and communicating are responsible for the evolution of civilization." -

"We are here because in this part of the universe time is trained to stop... Life cannot survive in time that flows, or while it flows. Life survives only when time stands still... So it could happen someplace, somehow, that eternity and time would meet at a golden intersection. At the very heart of the cross, where eternity and time would connect, time would stop to be blessed by eternity. And that, in fact, is our present. Consequently, the present is the very portion of time that has stopped. Life survives only in the present. The past, therefore, consists of moments during which time has previously stopped; the future, of moments during which time will subsequently stop. So here we are. We are here because in this part of the universe time stops and makes life possible. Perhaps we can imagine a time that is not lined up to intersect eternity, a time that would seem sterile to our way of thinking. In such a region of the universe, we would not be in a position to exist since our dominant features are those of life and death." - Milorad Pavić

"Every thing existing on the physical plain is an exteriorization of a thought which must be balanced through the one who issued the thought and in accordance with that one's responsibility at the conjunction of time, condition and place. This law of thought is Destiny. Thinking is the basic factor in shaping human destiny. The machinery of the law is nature. The purpose of the universe is to make all units of matter conscious of progressively higher degrees." - Harold W. Percival, fully Sir Harold Waldwin Percival

"All destiny begins with thinking. Responsibilities connected with the present duty. Duty of which leads to the balancing of the thought. One of the objects of life is to think without creating thoughts. That is without being attached to the object for which the thought is created and can be attained only when desire is self-controlled and directed by thinking. Until then, thoughts are created and are destiny." - Harold W. Percival, fully Sir Harold Waldwin Percival

"Thinking leads man to knowledge. He may see and hear, and read and learn whatever he pleases, and as much as he pleases; he will never know anything of it, except that which he has thought over, that which by thinking he has made the property of his own mind. Is it then saying too much if I say that man, by thinking only, becomes truly man? Take away thought from man's life, and what remains?" - Johann Pestalozzi, fully Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

"The mind ought sometimes to be diverted that it may return to better thinking." -

"We content ourselves to present to thinking minds the original seeds from whence spring vast fields of new thought, that may be further cultivated, beautified, and enlarged." - Chevalier Ramsay, formally Andrew Michael Ramsay

"There is no expedient to which man will not resort to void the real labor of thinking." - Joshua Reynolds, fully Sir Joshua Reynolds

"The reason why so few people are agreeable in conversation is, that each is thinking more of what he is intending to say, than of what others are saying; and we never listen when we are planning to speak." -

"We do not live in accordance with our mode of thinking, but we think in accordance with our mode of loving." - V. V. Rozanov, fully Vasily Vasilievich Rozanov or Vasilii Rosanov

"It is a very easy thing to devise good laws; the difficulty is to make them effective. The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws; and consequently the greatest art of a politician is to render vices serviceable to the cause of virtue." -

"By the spirit of the age... the man of today is forced into skepticism about his own thinking, in order to make him receptive to truth which comes to him from authority... Truth taken over by skepticism which has become believing... is not capable of uniting itself with him to the very marrow of his being." - Albert Schweitzer

"We can't always control what happens to us. But we can control what we think about what happens... And what we are thinking is our "life" at any particular moment." - Norman G. Shidle

"Though an inheritance of acres may be bequeathed, an inheritance of knowledge and wisdom cannot. The wealthy man may pay others for doing his work for him, but it is impossible to get his thinking done for him by another, or to purchase any kind of self-culture." - Samuel Smiles

"Thoughts are behavior. The mind is like a muscle which can be improved with practice. Many 'habits' are a result of poor thinking skills. We play thoughts over and over which keep us distracted from effective problem solving. When out-of-control thoughts run around inside our heads they cause anxiety. We then focus on unproductive thoughts and ideas." - Richard Smolowe, fully Richard Edward Smolowe

"The education of life perfects the thinking mind, but depraves the frivolous." -

"Music is indivisible. The dualism of feeling and thinking must be resolved to a state of unity in which one thinks with the heart and feels the brain." - George Szell, originally György Széll, György Endre Szél, or Georg Szell

"Expand your thinking of where you are to include your family - your neighbors - your country- other countries - a global village - the universe. Think not as a unit of one, but as a part of a unit of many. And look to the future with hope." - Tauri NULL

"Thinking, not growth, makes manhood. Accustom yourself, therefore, to thinking. Set yourself to understand whatever you see or read. To join thinking with reading is one of the first maxims, and one of the easiest operations." - Isaac Taylor