Quotes about thinking

It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.

Thought.—All the dignity of man consists in thought. Thought is therefore by its nature a wonderful and incomparable thing. It must have strange defects to be contemptible. But it has such, so that nothing is more ridiculous. How great it is in its nature! How vile it is in its defects! But what is this thought? How foolish it is!

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them. A thought has escaped me. I wanted to write it down. I write instead, that it has escaped me.

Man is obviously made to think. It is his whole dignity and his whole merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought. Now, the order of thought is to begin with self, and with its Author and its end. Now, of what does the world think? Never of this, but of dancing, playing the lute, singing, making verses, running at the ring, etc., fighting, making oneself king, without thinking what it is to be a king and what to be a man.

It was easy to hate if he did not think, Simon discovered.

In the black of night a man asks all the questions he dares not ask by daylight.

My mind is my weapon. My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer, and I have my mind...And a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.

Sometimes I don’t know if my life is complicated, or if it’s that I just think too much about things.

Rationality is not one of humanity’s strong points.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

There is a deep gap between our thinking about statistics and our thinking about individual cases.

It is the of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.