Ideals are a curse because they prevent you from thinking directly, simply and truly, when you are faced with facts. The ideal, the what should be, is an escape from what is. The what is is the fact that you are afraid—afraid of what your parents will say, of what people will think, afraid of society, afraid of disease, death; and if you face what is, look at it, go into it even though it brings you misery, and understand it, then you will find that your mind becomes extraordinarily simple, clear; and in that very clarity there is the cessation of fear.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti in Think on These Things
If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can’t do this.
—Spencer Silver
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
—Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.
—A. A. Milne
We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.
—John Dewey
Public opinion is no more than this: what people think that other people think.
—Alfred Austin
The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.
—David M. Ogilvy
It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.
—Marcel Proust
If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you.
—Don Marquis
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
—Soren Kierkegaard
To achieve the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.
—Tom Robbins
Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons.
—Will Cuppy
A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.
—William James
Everything on earth [is] beautiful, everything, except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.
—Anton Chekhov
It is my opinion that humans are largely what they make of themselves; in other words, "human nature" is not so much an empirical reality as a process of self-construction. This means that if people become what they think they are, what they think they are is exceedingly important.
—Linda Marie Fedigan