Quotes about thinking

You either believe what you think or you question it. There’s no other choice.

An unquestioned mind is the world of suffering.

Is it true?

Can you absolutely know that it's true?

How do you react when you believe that thought?

Who would you be without the thought?

The big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can't do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future.

I suggest that you use your mind to think about things, rather than to think of them. You want to be adding value... not simply reminding yourself they exist.

The short-term-memory part of your mind—the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized “stuff”—functions much like RAM on a personal computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term-memory space. And as with RAM, there’s limited capacity; there’s only so much “stuff” you can store in there and still have that part of your brain function at a high level. Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams. They’re constantly distracted, their focus disturbed by their own internal mental overload.

The mind is ductile, very much so: but images, ductilely received into it, need a certain time to harden and bake in their impressions, otherwise such a casualty as I speak of will in an instant obliterate them, as though they had never been. We are but clay, sir, potter's clay, as the good book says, clay, feeble, and too-yielding clay.

Waterhouse: "Now, if you--the ingenious Dr. Leibniz--contrive a machine that gives the impression of thinking--is that really thinking, or merely reflecting your genius?"

Leibniz: "You could as well have asked: are we thinking? Or merely reflecting God's genius?"

Waterhouse: "If we are mere mechanisms, obeying rules laid down by God, then all of our actions are predestined, and we are not really thinking."

Leibniz: "This is one of the two great labryrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. You were raised to believe in the latter. You have rejected it--which must have been a great spiritual struggle--and become a thinker. You have adopted a modern, mechanical philosophy. But that philosophy now seems to be leading you back towards predestination."

The intellectual breeds of humans think in terms of abstractions. But most people have emotions and think they are having ideas.

An animal that liked abstractions? Maybe that wasn’t all that bad a definition of being human.

Minds embodies in strange shapes would still find themselves sharpened against evolution’s ceaseless whetstone.

What challenges would they face? In the end the universe as a whole was life’s ultimate opponent.

When in enough doubt, let your subconscious work on the problem.