Stop the habit of wishful thinking and start the habit of thoughtful wishes.
It is a very easy thing to devise good laws; the difficulty is to make them effective. The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws; and consequently the greatest art of a politician is to render vices serviceable to the cause of virtue.--_Bolingbroke._
People are so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool's caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's are transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone were rosy.--_George Eliot._
One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feelings which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment. We have more or less the same bodies, but very different kinds of thoughts. I believe that we think much more with the instruments provided by our culture than we do with our bodies, and hence the much greater diversity of thought in the world. Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking.
We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call the one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen in the best sense.
This is where our intuitive knowledge leads us. If it be not true, there is no truth in man; and if it be, he finds therein a great reason for humiliation, because he must abase himself in one way or another. And since he cannot exist without such knowledge, I wish that before entering on deeper researches into nature he would consider her seriously and at leisure, that he would examine himself also, and knowing what proportion there is.... Let man then contemplate the whole realm of nature in its full and exalted majesty, and turn his eyes from the low objects which hem him round; let him observe that brilliant light set like an eternal lamp to illumine the universe, let the earth appear to him a point in comparison with the vast circle described by that sun, and let him see with amazement that even this vast circle is itself but a fine point in regard to that described by the stars revolving in the firmament. If our view be arrested there, let imagination pass beyond, and it will sooner exhaust the power of thinking than nature that of giving scope for thought. The whole visible world is but an imperceptible speck in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it. We may swell our conceptions beyond all imaginable space, yet bring forth only atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is every where, the circumference no where. It is, in short, the greatest sensible mark of the almighty power of God, in that thought let imagination lose itself.
The thing about growing up with Fred and George," said Ginny thoughtfully, "is that you sort of start thinking anything's possible if you've got enough nerve.
The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
Proof-texting did not cause great damage so long as the culture as a whole held to general Christian values, but when those general Christian values began to weaken, the weakness in evangelical theologizing — even more, in thinking like a Christian about the world in general — became all too evident.
A man passes his life without weariness in playing every day for a small stake. Give him each morning, on condition he does not play, the money he might possibly win, and you make him miserable. It will be said, perhaps, that he seeks the amusement of play, and not the winnings. Make him then play for nothing, he will not be excited over it, and will soon be wearied. Mere diversion then is not his pursuit, a languid and passionless amusement will weary him. He must grow warm in it, and cheat himself by thinking that he is made happy by gaining what he would despise if it were given him not to play; and must frame for himself a subject of passion and excitement to employ his desire, his wrath, his fear, as children are frightened at a face they themselves have daubed.
She had seen her son for the first time, in this place, when he was a child of eight or nine. She remembered that day. He ran along the path near the cottage to which she had been assigned, calling to his friends, laughing, his unkempt hair bright in the sunlight. “Gabe!” she heard a boy call; but she would have known him without hearing it. It was the same smile she remembered, the same silvery laugh. She had moved forward in that moment, intending to rush to him, to greet and embrace him. Perhaps she would make the silly face, the one with which they had once mimicked each other. But when she started eagerly toward him, she forgot her own weakness; her dragging foot caught on a stone and she stumbled clumsily. Quickly she righted herself, but in that moment she saw him glance toward her, then look away in disinterest. As if looking through his eyes, she perceived her own withered skin, her sparse gray hair, the awkward gait with which she moved. She stayed silent, and turned away, thinking.
The characteristic mark of minds= (_Geister_) =of the first order is the directness= (_Unmittelbarkeit_) =of all their judgments. All that they bring forth= (_vorbringen_) =is the result of their own thinking.
So while I still hate to readjust my thinking, still hate to give up old ways of perceiving and conceptualizing, yet at some deeper level I have, to a considerable degree, come to realize that these painful reorganizations are what is known as learning,
Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else; very rarely to those who say to themselves, "Go to now, let us be a celebrated individual."
Man kann den Menschen nicht verwehren, / Zu denken, was sie wollen=--There is no hindering people from thinking what thoughts they like.
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.
There is no harm in anybody thinking that Christ is in bread. The harm is in the expectation of His presence in gunpowder.
Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
_Diversion._--Is not the royal dignity itself so truly great as to make its possessor happy by the mere contemplation of what he is? Must he be diverted from this thought like ordinary people? I see well enough that a man may be made happy by diverting him from the thought of his domestic sorrows so that he apply all his care to excel in dancing. But will it be the same with a king, and will he be happier if he devote himself to these idle amusements rather than to the contemplation of his greatness? And what more satisfactory object can he offer to his mind? Might it not be to lessen his content that he occupy his soul in thinking how to suit his steps to the cadence of an air, or how to throw a bar skilfully, rather than allow it to enjoy peacefully the contemplation of the majesty which wraps him round? Let us make the experiment, let us leave a king all alone, without any gratifications of sense, or any occupation for the mind, without companions, reflecting on himself at leisure, and it will be seen that a king without diversion is a man full of miseries. This is therefore carefully avoided, and there are always about the persons of kings a great number of people who watch to see that diversion succeeds to business, and look after their every hour of leisure to furnish them with pleasures and games, so that no vacancy may be left in life; that is, they are surrounded with persons who take wonderful pains that the king is never alone and able to think of self, knowing well that he will be miserable, king though he is, if he think of self.
I find myself thinking about her all the time. But I hurt her.
A sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,-- A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.
At this point in history when all things which concern man and the structure and elements of history itself are suddenly revealed to us in a new light, it behooves us in our scientific thinking to become masters of the situation, for it is not inconceivable that sooner than we suspect, as has often been the case before in history, this vision may disappear, the opportunity may be lost, and the world will once again present a static, uniform, and inflexible countenance.
We live and breathe words. .... It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt--I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamt. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted--and then I realized that truly I just wanted you.
It is joy to the Christian to know that the plummet is now in the hands of our great Zerubbabel, and that when He comes forth, the world's misrule shall be over. The false standards and false estimates of men shall be swept away. The standards of "expediency," of "conscience," of "every man thinking as he likes, if he is only _sincere_"--these, and all similar refuges of lies shall be like a spider's web. The measure of all things will be Christ, and Christ the Measurer of all things.
Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function; living is the functionary.
Think BIG! You are going to be thinking anyway, so think BIG! ― Donald Trump
Der Mensch ist nicht bloss ein denkendes, er ist zugleich ein empfindendes Wesen. Er ist ein Ganzes, eine Einheit vielfacher, innig verbundner Krafte, und zu diesem Ganzen muss das Kunstwerk reden=--Man is not merely a thinking, he is at the same time a sentient, being. He is a whole, a unity of manifold, internally connected powers, and to this whole must the work of art speak.
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
I am wrapped in dismal thinking.--_Shakespeare._
Though he says nothing, he pays it with thinking, like the Welshman's jackdaw.
The Quakers have an excellent approach to thinking through difficult problems, where a number of intelligent and responsible people must work together. They meet as equals, and anyone who has an idea speaks up. There are no parliamentary procedures and no coercion from the Chair. They continue the discussion until unanimity is reached. I want you guys to do that. Get in a room with no phones and leave orders that you are not to be disturbed. And sit there until you can deal with each other as individuals
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any
Don’t you dare tell anyone about this,” she orders. “Why not? It’ll only boost your street cred.” “I don’t want to be another one of your puck bunnies, and I don’t want people thinking I am, understood?” Her use of the term makes me grin harder. I like that she’s picking up the hockey lingo. Maybe one of these days, I’ll even convince her to come to a game. I have a feeling Hannah would be a great heckler, which is always an advantage at home games. Though knowing her, she’d probably heckle us and give the other team the advantage.
Dissidents should be paid 13 months' salary for a year, otherwise our mindless unanimity will bring us to an even more hopeless state of stagnation. It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical: At such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious than gold. Indeed, people must not be deprived of the right to think their own thoughts.
So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.
The thinking minds of all nations call for change. There is a deep-lying struggle in the whole fabric of society; a boundless, grinding collision of the new with the old.
Hablar sin pensar es tirar sin encarar=--Speaking without thinking is shooting without taking aim.
There’s a strange kind of freedom in the dark; a terrifying vulnerability we allow ourselves at exactly the wrong moment, tricked by the darkness into thinking it will keep our secrets. We forget that the blackness is not a blanket; we forget that the sun will soon rise. But in the moment, at least, we feel brave enough to say things we’d never say in the light.
Rahab knelt down and fed more twigs into the fire. She was thinking how to answer this man. “As I told you,” she said finally, “I did it because of your god. What is his name?” “He has many names. Jehovah is one of them.” “Jehovah. What does that mean?” “It’s an odd sort of name. It means, more or less, ‘one who keeps covenant with His people’” “And what is a covenant?” “It’s a promise, an agreement. Like if I promised you I would come on a certain day, say next week. That would be a covenant between us.” “And what promises has your god made you?” “Many,” Ardon said.
The person who reads too much and uses his brain too little will fall into lazy habits of thinking.
not everyone on this planet is going to like you. It doesn’t matter what you do, what your hairstyle looks like, what type of music you listen to, or how nice you are. Someone somewhere is going to hate you. And thinking you can do anything to change other people’s minds will lead you to insanity.
I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.
I was thinking about the first time I ever saw you," he said, "and how after that I couldn't forget you. I wanted to, but I couldn't stop myself. I forced Hodge to let me be the one who came to find you and bring you back to the Institue. And even back then, in that stupid coffee shop, when I saw you sitting on that couch with Simon, even then that felt wrong to me-- I should have been the one sitting with you. The one who made you laugh like that. I couldn't get rid of that feeling. That it should have been me. And the more I knew you, the more I felt it--it had never been like that for me before. I'd always wanted a girl and then gotten to know her and not wanted her anymore, but with you the feeling just got stronger and stronger until that night when you showed up at Renwick's and I knew.
A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.
To expand our minds and to become more fully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can. The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.
you don’t think yourself into a new way of acting, you act yourself into a new way of thinking.
One of the worst diseases to which the human creature is liable is its disease of thinking. If it would only just look at a thing instead of thinking what it must be like, or do a thing instead of thinking it cannot be done, we should all get on far better.
It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand?
The present time, youngest born of eternity, child and heir of all the past times with their good and evil, and parent of all the future, is ever a new era to the thinking man.
When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and wiser still by himself; and I went and tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me. So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is - for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know.
To assume that every word, every letter, every parable, every figure was whispered to the authors of the Gospels, is certainly an absurdity, and rests only on human ... authority. But the true revelation, the real truth, as it was already anticipated by the Greek philosophers, slowly accepted by Jews, like Philo and the contemporaries of Jesus, taught by men like Clement and Origen in the ancient Greek Church, and, in fine, realised in the life of Jesus, and sealed by His death, is no absurdity: it is for every thinking Christian the eternal life, or the Kingdom of God on earth, which Jesus wished to establish, and in part did establish. To become a citizen of this Kingdom is the highest that man can attain, but it is not attained merely through baptism and confirmation; it must be gained in earnest spiritual conflict.
Though an inheritance of acres may be bequeathed, an inheritance of knowledge and wisdom cannot. The wealthy man may pay others for doing his work for him, but it is impossible to get his thinking done for him by another, or to purchase any kind of self-culture.--_Samuel Smiles._
Vivere est cogitare=--Living is thinking.
How few think justly of the thinking few; / How many never think, who think they do!
All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions. All change is the result of a change in the contemporary state of mind. Don't be afraid of being out of tune with your environment, and above all pray God that you are not afraid to live, to live hard and fast. To my way of thinking it is not the years in your life but the life in your years that count in the long run. You'll have more fun, you'll do more and you'll get more, you'll give more satisfaction the more you know, the more you have worked, and the more you have lived. For yours is a great adventure at a stirring time in the annals of men.
Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society \x97 nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms. Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community. The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close political cohesion.
We are addicted to our thoughts. We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking.
The figures of men have gestures which correspond to what they are doing, so that in seeing them you understand what they are thinking of and saying; and these will be learned well by him who will copy the gestures of the dumb, for they speak by the gestures of their hands, their eyes, their brows and their whole person, when they wish to express the purpose of their mind. And do not mock me because I suggest a dumb teacher for the teaching of an art of which he is himself ignorant, because he will teach you better by his gestures than all the others with their words. And despise not such advice because they are the masters of gesture, and understand at a {118} distance what a man is talking of if he suits the actions of the hands to the words.
The utmost point and acme of honour is not merely in doing no evil, but in thinking none.
As those persons who despair of ever being rich make little account of small expenses, thinking that little added to a little will never make any great sum.
With too much quickness ever to be taught; With too much thinking to have common thought.
I find myself thinking about her all the time. But I hurt her. I didn’t mean to hurt her. I’d do anything to take back the pain I caused, but I don’t think she’ll listen to me. So the only thing I know to do is start over, then maybe she’ll give me another chance.
Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
The ordinary world has the power of not thinking about what it does not choose to think about. "Do not reflect on those passages about the Messiah," said the Jew to his son. So our people often act. Thus false religions are preserved, and the true also, as regards many people.
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, / Tears from the depth of some divine despair / Rise in the heart and gather in the eyes, / In looking on the happy autumn fields, / And thinking of the days that are no more.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
Today we must abandon competition and secure cooperation. This must be the central fact in all our considerations of international affairs; otherwise we face certain disaster. Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars... The stakes are immense, the task colossal, the time is short. But we may hope \x97 we must hope \x97 that man\x92s own creation, man\x92s own genius, will not destroy him.
On the face of the matter it is not obvious that the brilliant poet had less chance of doing good service in natural science than the dullest of dissectors and nomenclators. Indeed, as I have endeavoured to indicate, there was considerable reason, a hundred years ago, for thinking that an infusion of the artistic way of looking at things might tend to revivify the somewhat mummified body of technical zoology and botany. Great ideas were floating about; the artistic apprehension was needed to give these airy nothings a local habitation and a name; to convert vague suppositions into definite hypotheses. And I apprehend that it was just this service which Goethe rendered by writing his essays on the intermaxillary bone, on osteology generally, and on the metamorphoses of plants.
A flippant, frivolous man may ridicule others, may controvert them, scorn them; but he who has any respect for himself seems to have renounced the right of thinking meanly of others.--_Goethe._
With the demonstration of the naturalness of the supernatural, scepticism even may come to be regarded as unscientific. And those who have wrestled long for a few bare truths to ennoble life and rest their souls in thinking of the future will not be left in doubt. Natural Law, Introduction, p. 32.
We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.
_Morality._--God having made the heavens and the earth, which cannot feel the happiness of their being, he has been pleased to make beings who should know it, and who should compose a body of thinking members. For our members do not feel the happiness of their union, of their admirable intelligence, of the care which nature has taken to infuse into them a mind, and to make them grow and endure. How happy would they be if they could see and feel it. But in order to this they must needs have intelligence to know it, and good will to consent to that of the universal soul. For if, having received intelligence, they used it to retain nourishment for themselves without allowing it to pass to the other members, they would be not only unjust but also miserable, and would hate rather than love themselves, their blessedness as well as their duty consisting in their consent to the guidance of the general soul to which they belong, who loves them better than they love themselves.
Since we regard our self or I as so very precious and important, we exaggerate our own good qualities and develop an inflated view of ourself. Almost anything can serve as a basis for this arrogant mind, such as our appearance, possessions, knowledge, experiences, or status. If we make a witty remark we think, “I’m so clever!” or if we have traveled around the world we feel that this automatically makes us a fascinating person. We can even develop pride on the basis of things we should be ashamed of, such as our ability to deceive others, or on qualities that we only imagine we possess. On the other hand we find it very hard to accept our mistakes and shortcomings. We spend so much time contemplating our real or imagined good qualities that we become oblivious to our faults. In reality our mind is full of gross delusions but we ignore them and may even fool ourself into thinking that we do not have such repulsive minds. This is like pretending that there is no dirt in our house after sweeping it under the rug.