Quotes about thinking

Most people are too indifferent or lazy to acquire facts with which to think accurately. They prefer to act on "opinions" created by guesswork or snap-judgments. p.88

You have absolute control over but one thing, and that is your thoughts. This is the most significant and inspiring of all facts known to man! It reflects man's Divine nature. This Divine prerogative is the sole means by which you may control your own destiny. If you fail to control your own mind, you may be sure you will control nothing else. p. 173

All achievement, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea! p.18

I've found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize that they had really heard new things: that is things that they had never heard before. They kept translating what they heard into their habitual language. They had ceased to hope and believe there might be anything new.

I’ve alway known that the quality of love was the mind, even though the body sometimes refuses this knowledge. The body lives for itself. It lives only to feed and wait for the night. It’s essentially nocturnal. But what of the mind which is born of the sun, William, and must spend thousands of hours of a lifetime awake and aware? Can you balance off the body, that pitiful, selfish thing of night against a whole lifetime of sun and intellect? I don’t know.

“Don’t these people ever get lonely?”

“They’re used to it this way.”

“Don’t they get afraid, then?”

”They have a religion for that.”

“I wish I had a religion.”

“The minute you get a religion you stop thinking,” he said. “Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.”

To make a contented slave it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken the moral and mental vision and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.

The polls undoubtedly help to decide what people think, but their most important long-term influence may be on how people think. The interrogative process is very distinctly weighted against the asking of an intelligent question or the recording of a thoughtful answer.

The mind was a marvellous instrument, thought Shimrod; when left to wander untended, it often arrived at curious destinations.

“You make very narrow distinctions.”

“Of course! That is the nature of clear thinking.”

An ethic isn’t a fact you can look up. It’s a way of thinking.

The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, prophane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame, or blame…