This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Every head must do its own thinking." - Jabo Proverbs
"Facts exist independent of our wishes, and responsible moral thinking begins when we try to see things as they are." - James Rachels
"Most men when they think they are thinking are simply rearranging their prejudices." - Knut Rockne, fully Knute Kenneth Rockne
"If humanity, or life in general, was created to serve a particular purpose beyond itself, our being would be analogous to a manufactured artifact. There seems to be little in this state of affairs to justify the exultation that religious people sometimes feel in thinking that God's plan reveals the purpose and the meaning of all reality." - Irving Singer
"Philosophy may help to cleanse our thinking, but only in experience itself, in stumbling through life and reflecting about our moments of joy and despair, can we learn how to live." - Irving Singer
"We are by nature thinking beings, and if we cannot escape anxiety about the inherent structure of our thought processes, how can we hope to creative purposive ideals that are congruent with reality instead of deflecting us from it?" - Irving Singer
"We should each ask ourselves: what place does ethics have in my daily life? In thinking about this question, ask yourself: what do I think of as a good life, in the fullest sense of that term? This is an ultimate question. To ask it is to ask: what kind of a life do I truly admire, and what kind of life do I hope to be able to look back on, when I am older and reflect on how I have lived? Will it be enough to say: "It was fun"?" - Peter Singer
"To see what students learn in school, look at how they leave school. If they leave thinking that reading and writing are difficult and pointless, that mathematics is confusing, that history is irrelevant, and that art is a bore, then that is what they have been taught. People learn what is demonstrated to them, and this reality will not change to suit the convenience of politicians and educations administrators." - Frank Smith
"Thinking implies disagreement; and disagreement implies nonconformity; and nonconformity implies heresy; and heresy implies disloyalty - so, obviously, thinking must be stopped." - Adlai Ewing Stevenson
"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, fully Alan Alexander "A. A." Milne
"Harmonious living tells of harmonious thinking. A turbulent life reveals some kind of inner turmoil or lack of resolution... Outer events are simply the skin and bones of inner thoughts, and to really take control of our lives, we must treat them as one. Concentrate on that which you would become, not that which you now believe you are, and you will enter a new realm of consciousness - one of chosen good." - Alan Cohen
"Suffering is born of wrong thinking. The root of pain is error in perception . There can be no error in Truth, only errors in the perception of Truth. If you yearn to end human suffering, know, then, what is Real, for this Knowledge is the only source of invincible faith." - Alan Cohen
"Harmonious living tells of harmonious thinking. A turbulent life reveals some kind of inner turmoil or lack of resolution... Outer events are simply the skin and bones of inner thoughts, and to really take control of our lives, we must treat them as one. Concentrate on that which you would become, not that which you now believe you are, and you will enter a new realm of consciousness - one of chosen good." -
"Harmonious living tells of harmonious thinking. A turbulent life reveals some kind of inner turmoil or lack of resolution... Outer events are simply the skin and bones of inner thoughts, and to really take control of our lives, we must treat them as one. Concentrate on that which you would become, not that which you now believe you are, and you will enter a new realm of consciousness - one of chosen good." -
"We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking." - Albert Camus
"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought." - Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi de Nagyrápolt
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." - Alfred North Whitehead
"The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur. . . . Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." - Alfred North Whitehead
"The scholar is not The Intellectual. He is Man Thinking. Man Thinking is not the member of a race apart. He is the citizen performing the function appointed for all citizens in a civilized state, a function without which there would be no civilized state. He is Everyman purposefully apprehending the meaning of things." - Alfred Whitney Griswold
"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any." - Alice Walker, fully Alice Malsenior Walker
"Thought means life, since those who do not think do not live in any high or real sense. Thinking makes the man." - Amos Bronson Alcott
"Thought means life, since those who do not think so do not live in any high or real sense. Thinking makes the man." - Amos Bronson Alcott
"Thus with love. They err who think that they have but to learn about love, if they are to come by it. And that man hoodwinks himself who drifts through life hoping to be vanquished by love, learning by fitful fevers to enjoy brief stirrings of the heart, ever thinking to encounter that supreme fever which will enkindle his whole life; though, by reason of his pettiness of mind and the insignificance of the hill he has climbed, it can be but a short-lived exaltation of his heart. Thus, too, love is no sure resting place if it does not transform itself from day to day, like a child in the womb... For all that is neither ascent nor a transition lacks significance." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"If thinking is perceiving, it must be either a process in which the soul is acted upon by what is capable of being thought, or a process different from but analogous to that. The thinking part of the soul must therefore be, while impassable, capable of receiving the form of an object; that is, must be potentially identical in character with its object without being the object. Mind must be related to what is thinkable, as sense is to what is sensible." - Aristotle NULL
"The pleasures arising from thinking and learning will make us think and learn all the more." - Aristotle NULL
"The primary objects of desire and of thought are the same. For the apparent good is the object of appetite, and the real good is the primary object of rational wish. But desire is consequent of opinion rather than opinion on desire; for the thinking is the starting-point." - Aristotle NULL
"Democracy arose from men's thinking that if they are equal in any respect, they are equal absolutely." - Aristotle NULL
"Thinking for oneself is always arduous and is sometimes painful. The temptation to stop thinking and to take dogma on faith is strong. Yet, since the intellect does possess the capacity to think for itself, it also has the impulse and feels the obligation. We may therefore feel sure that the intellect will always refuse, sooner or later, to take traditional doctrines on trust." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"The only thing that I am reasonably sure of is that anybody who's got an ideology has stopped thinking." - Arthur Asher Miller
"The majority of men...are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and... are not accessible to reason, but only to authority." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"Instead of always thinking about our plans and anxiously looking to the future, or giving ourselves up to regret for the past, we should never forget that the present is the only reality, the only certainty; the future almost always turns out contrary to our expectations; the past, too, was very different from what we suppose it to have been." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"It is impossible to live without thinking but it is possible to avoid thinking about God. Does it matter?" - Arthur W Osborn
"A person who does not know how to use his mind productively will flee from the state of being alone. But when a person has leaned to think, he will greatly appreciate the moments when he is by himself, for then he will be able to utilize those moments for intellectual and spiritual growth. In fact, moments of solitude serve as tests to a person to clarify how thinking-oriented he really is." - Author Unknown NULL
"If everybody's thinking alike, somebody isn't thinking." - Author Unknown NULL