Quotes on Thought
We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.
Blaise Pascal
Study without reflection is a waste of time; reflection without study is dangerous.
Confucius
Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
Bertrand Russell
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
Soren Kierkegaard
There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.
Thomas Alva Edison
Work joyfully and peacefully, knowing that right thoughts and right efforts will inevitably bring about right results.
James Allen
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To be ambitious for wealth, and yet always expecting to be poor; to be always doubting your ability to get what you long for, is like trying to reach east by traveling west. There is no philosphy which will help man to succeed when he is always doubting his ability to do so, and thus attracting failure. No matter how hard you work for success, if your thought is saturated with the fear of failure, it will kill your efforts, neutralize your endeavors and make success impossible.
Charles Baudouin
Nurture your mind with great thoughts; to believe in the heroic makes heroes.
Benjamin Disraeli
Your life is a reflection of your thoughts. If you change your thinking, you change your life.
Brian Tracy
Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.
Charles Dickens
Man is made or unmade by himself; in the armory of thought he forges the weapons by which he destroys himself. He also fashions the tools with which he builds for himself heavenly mansions of joy and strength and peace.
James Allen
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Cause and effect is as absolute and undeviating in the hidden realm of thought as in the world of visible and material things. A noble and Godlike character is not a thing of favor or chance, but is the natural result of continued effort in right thinking, the effect of long-cherished association with Godlike thoughts. An ignoble and bestial character, by the same process, is the result of the continued harboring of groveling thoughts.
James Allen
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Man is the master of thought, the molder of character, and the maker and shaper of condition, environment, and destiny.
James Allen
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Every thought seed sown or allowed to fall into the mind, and to take root there, produces its own. Good thoughts bear good fruit, bad thoughts bad fruit.
James Allen
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A man's mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will, bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind.
James Allen
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Not what he wishes and prays for does a man get, but what he justly earns. His wishes and prayers are only gratified and answered when they harmonize with his thoughts and actions.
James Allen
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At the bidding of unlawful thoughts the body sinks rapidly into disease and decay; at the command of glad and beautiful thoughts it becomes clothed with youthfulness and beauty.
James Allen
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Having conceived of his purpose, a man should mentally mark out a straight pathway to its achievement, looking neither to the right nor the left. Doubts and fears should be rigorously excluded; they are disintegrating elements which break up the straight line of effort, rendering it crooked, ineffectual, useless. Thoughts of doubt and fear never accomplish anything, and never can. They always lead to failure. Purpose, energy, power to do, and all strong thoughts cease when doubt and fear creep in.
James Allen
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Thought allied fearlessly to purpose becomes creative force.
James Allen
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A man can only rise, conquer, and achieve by lifting up his thoughts. He can only remain weak, and abject, and miserable by refusing to lift up his thoughts.
James Allen
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Before a man can achieve anything, even in worldly things, he must lift his thoughts above slavish animal indulgence.
James Allen
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A man whose first thought is bestial indulgence could neither think clearly nor plan methodically. He could not find and develop his latent resources, and would fail in any undertaking. Not having commenced manfully to control his thoughts, he is not in a position to control affairs and to adopt serious responsibilities.
James Allen
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The universe does not favor the greedy, the dishonest, the vicious, although on the mere surface it may sometimes appear to do so; it helps the honest, the magnanimous, the virtuous. All the great Teachers of the ages have declared this in varying forms, and to prove and know it a man has but to persist in making himself more and more virtuous by lifting up his thoughts.
James Allen
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What you think, multiplied by action plus time, will create what you get.
Jeff Olson
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To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must cultivate our personal life; and to cultivate our personal life, we must first set our hearts right.
Confucius
Great men are they who see the spiritual is stronger than the material force, that thoughts rule the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
Terry Pratchett
The mind is a dutiful servant and will follow the instructions we give it.
Zig Ziglar
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Albert Einstein
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
George Bernard Shaw
While I believe in the power of positive thought, I do not believe that you or I can simply psyche ourselves into success or peace of mind.
Stephen Covey
The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope.
Samuel Johnson
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.
Albert Einstein
Successful people think about solutions most of the time. Unsuccessful people think about problems and difficulties most of the time.
Brian Tracy
Don't use your mind for a filing cabinet. Use your mind to work out problems and find answers; file away good ideas in your journal.
Jim Rohn
To think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral down into ever increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline - training - is about.
James Clavell
The subconscious mind makes no distinction between constructive and destructive thought impulses. It works with the material we feed it, through our thought impulses. The subconscious mind will translate into reality a thought driven by fear, just as readily as it will translate into reality a thought driven by courage or faith.
Napoleon Hill
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what is read ours.
John Locke
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thought.
James Allen
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Bertrand Russell
There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge.
Napoleon Hill
Thought, backed by strong desire, has a tendency to transmute itself into its physical equivalent.
Napoleon Hill
If you fail to plant desires in your subconscious mind, it will feed upon the thoughts which reach it as the result of your neglect.
Napoleon Hill
The subconscious mind is more susceptible to influence by impulses of thought mixed with "feeling" or emotion, than by those originating solely in the reasoning portion of the mind.
Napoleon Hill
A great preservative against angry and mutinous thoughts, and all impatience and quarreling, is to have some great business and interest in your mind, which, like a sponge shall suck up your attention and keep you from brooding over what displeases you.
Joseph Rickaby
Be yourself and think for yourself; and while your conclusions may not be infallible they will be nearer right than the conclusions forced on you by those who have a personal interest in keeping you in ignorance.
Elbert Hubbard
The difference between success and failure is the difference between thought and action.
Praveen Sherman
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
William James
A man's life is what his thoughts make of it.
Marcus Aurelius
This is the source.
It is well for people who think to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean. For those who do not think, it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while.
Luther Burbank
Garner up pleasant thoughts in your mind, for pleasant thoughts make pleasant lives.
John Wilkins
The deep root of failure in our lives is to think, 'Oh how useless and powerless I am.' It is essential to think strongly and forcefully, 'I can do it,' without boasting or fretting.
Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso
Every thought is a seed. If you plant crab apples, don't count on harvesting golden delicious.
Bill Meyer
Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both.
John Andrew Holmes
The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to prevailing superstition or taboo.
H. L. Mencken
You need to avoid certain things in your train of thought: everything random, everything irrelevant. And certainly everything self-important or malicious. You need to get used to winnowing your thoughts, so that if someone says, "What are you thinking about?" you can respond at once (and truthfully) that you are thinking this or thinking that. And it would be obvious at once from your answer that your thoughts were straightforward and considerate ones - the thoughts of an unselfish person, one unconcerned with pleasure and with sensual indulgence generally, with squabbling, with slander and envy, or anything else you'd be ashamed to be caught thinking.
Marcus Aurelius
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The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.
Marcus Aurelius
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This is the perpetual and pitiful tragedy of the practical man in practical affairs. He always begins with a flourish of contempt for what he calls theorizing and what people who can do it call thinking. He will not wait for logic - that is, in the most exact sense, he will not listen to reason. It will therefore appear to him an idle and ineffectual proceeding to say that there is a reason for his present failure. Nevertheless, it may be well to say it, and to try and make it clear even to him.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Training yourself to think unthinkable thoughts has advantages beyond the thoughts themselves. It's like stretching. When you stretch before running, you put your body into positions much more extreme than any it will assume during the run. If you can think things so outside the box that they'd make people's hair stand on end, you'll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that people call innovative.
Paul Graham
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Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
Mark Twain
The most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur.
John Dewey
Thinking is skilled work. It is not true that we are naturally endowed with the ability to think clearly and logically without learning how, or without practicing. People with untrained minds should no more expect to think clearly and logically than people who have never learned and never practiced can expect to find themselves good carpenters, golfers, bridge players, or pianists.
Alfred Mander
When we cultivate good habits of thought, we lower the cost of thinking and therefore choose to do more of it. That's often a profitable venture.
Steven Landsburg
It is a vast, and pervasive, cognitive mistake to assume that people who agree with you (or disagree) do so on the same criteria that you care about.
Megan McCardle
Since the only way you are going to find solutions to painful problems is by thinking deeply about them — i.e., reflecting — if you can develop a knee-jerk reaction to pain that is to reflect rather than to fight or flee, it will lead to your rapid learning/evolving.
Ray Dalio
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This combination of active and contemplative virtues is one of the most enduring themes in three thousand years of experience of what it means to be a man.
Waller Newell
Men of ideas and men of action have much to learn from each other, and the truly great are men of both action and abstraction.
Jack Donovan
If you cannot examine your thoughts, you have no choice but to think them, however silly they may be.
Richard Mitchell
As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
Henry David Thoreau
You too can sometimes get what you want by adopting a practical illusion. Reality is overrated and impossible to understand with any degree of certainty. What you do know for sure is that some ways of looking at the world work better than others. Pick the way that works, even if you don't know why.
Scott Adams
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Mastery of life requires mastery of thought. This mastery does not begin by searching for the right thoughts to think; it begins by recognizing the wrong ones and letting them go.
Kent Thune
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