Thinker Quotes - Page 24

• To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.

  Alan Watts

  Running, Pain, Fighting

  Alan Watts (1951). “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, Vintage

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• Now that you're an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favor of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants and could do without the pitying looks from fellow diners. Or you're told that you're "in your head too much", a phrase that's often deployed against the quiet and cerebral. Or maybe there's another word for such people: thinkers.

  Susan Cain

  Book, People, Guilt

  Susan Cain (2012). “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking”, p.7, Broadway Books

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• I just don't think we think about jurists as rock stars or great thinkers, particularly in the political world.

  Dahlia Lithwick

  Stars, Thinking, Rocks

  "What Would Brandeis Do?". "Amicus" with Dahlia Lithwick, www.slate.com. June 16, 2016.

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• Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.

  Aldo Leopold

  Land, Ezekiel, Belief

  Aldo Leopold (1968). “A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There”, p.178, Oxford University Press

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• I say, 'Get me some poets as managers.' Poets are our original systems thinkers. They contemplate the world in which we live and feel obligated to interpret, and give expression to it in a way that makes the reader understand how that world runs. Poets, those unheralded systems thinkers, are our true digital thinkers. It is from their midst that I believe we will draw tomorrow's new business leaders." --Sidney Harman, CEO Multimillionaire of a stereo components company

  Daniel H. Pink

  Running, Believe, Expression

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• Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Pain, Joy, Mindfulness

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• One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Time, Children, Age

  "Aphorisms". Book by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Notebook K 51, 1799.

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• Each part of the mind sees only a little of what happens in some others, and that little is swiftly refined, reformulated and "represented." We like to believe that these fragments have meanings in themselves - apart from the great webs of structure from which they emerge - and indeed this illusion is valuable to us qua thinkers - but not to us as psychologists - because it leads us to think that expressible knowledge is the first thing to study.

  Marvin Minsky

  Believe, Knowledge, Thinking

  "K-Linesː A Theory of Memory". Cognitive Science 4, 1980.

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• The church hates a thinker precisely for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff, or a thief despises the prosecuting witness.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Hate, Religion, Church

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.100, Library of Alexandria

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• Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Science, Men, Cities

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2008). “The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.70, Penguin

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• In America, we hurry-which is well; but when the day's work is done, we go on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry our business cares to bed with us...we burn up our energies with these excitements, and either die early or drop into a lean and mean old age at a time of life which they call a man's prime in Europe...What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges!

  Mark Twain

  Work, Mean, Loss

  Mark Twain, Caroline Thomas Harnsberger (2009). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.7, Courier Corporation

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• See who is the doubter, who is the thinker. It is the ego. Hold it; the other thoughts will die away - the ego will be left pure. See the source from where the ego arises and abide in it. That is pure consciousness.

  Ramana Maharshi

  Yoga, Ego, Doubters

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• What, indeed, is an atheist? He is one who destroys delusions which are harmful to humanity in order to lead men back to nature, to reality, to reason. He is a thinker who, having reflected on the nature of matter, its energy, properties and ways of acting, has no need of idealized powers or imaginary intelligences to explain the phenomena of the universe and the operations of nature.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Atheist, Reality, Men

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• Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Book, Home, Mean

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2010). “The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs”, p.144, Vintage

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• If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil.

  Janet Fitch

  Mean, Artist, Self

  Janet Fitch (2002). “White Oleander”, Large Print Press

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• There is no unmoving mover behind the movement. It is only movement. It is not correct to say that life is moving, but life is movement itself. Life and movement are not two different things. In other words, there is no thinker behind the thought. Thought itself is the thinker. If you remove the thought, there is no thinker to be found.

  Walpola Rahula

  Moving, Two, Different

  Walpola Rahula (2014). “What the Buddha Taught”, p.32, Oneworld Publications

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• A free thinker used to be a man who had been educated on ideas of religion, law, morality, and had arrived at free thought by virtue of his own struggle and toil; but now a new type of born freethinker has been appearing, who’ve never even heard that there have been laws of morality and religion, and that there are authorities, but who simply grow up with negative ideas about everything, that is savages.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Growing Up, Struggle, Men

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• This is probably the advantage of being stupid. Stupid people just do. We tend to overthink. If we could eliminate the “over” and just think, then we could do, too. Only we’d be smarter doers because we’d be thinkers.

  Sarah Strohmeyer

  Stupid, Thinking, People

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• The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Work, Thinking, Pay

  W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The Souls of Black Folk: The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois”, p.69, Oxford University Press

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• If the individual is narrowly concentrated on the goal, to the exclusion of other relevant aspects of the problem situation, he is often unable to achieve a solution. The creative thinker must stand sufficiently detached from his work.

  Mary Henle

  Creativity, Goal, Creative

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• It seems safe to say that significant discovery, really creative thinking, does not occur with regard to problems about which the thinker is lukewarm.

  Mary Henle

  Passion, Creativity, Thinking

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• Hillary Clinton has a vision, she has knowledge and judgment. She is a strategic thinker, based on her experience and her connection.

  Nancy Pelosi

  Vision, Connections, Judgment

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Somewhere along the line, I conditioned myself to be a quick thinker. I take a step back and try to assess the situation, then make the best decision possible at the moment.

  Jonathan Sadowski

  Decision, Trying, Lines

  Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• I'm a big thinker, and sometimes I think too much, and my brain can get in the way of myself.

  Amanda Crew

  Thinking, Brain, Too Much

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• I've always been a very rebellious, philosophical person, so my mother set the foundation for my appreciation for nature and my empathy for other people. But then, being a sort of rebellious, philosophical thinker, I'm always looking for new ways to shake things up. So I feel like I'm really lucky to be alive in a time where there's so much opportunity to disrupt and shake it up. It's sort of a combination between that and having the foundation that my mother gave me.

  Adrian Grenier

  Mother, Appreciation, Philosophical

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