“No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.”
—Voltaire
Your thoughts can shape your feelings can shape your actions.
Thinking is powerful stuff whether you’re shaping your moment or shaping your lifetime.
The real beauty is that thinking is a skill, and you can develop throughout your lifetime.
To build our thinking skills, we can draw from the wisdom of the ages and modern sages. And quotes are one of the best ways to do that.
Whether it’s positive thinking quotes, or critical thinking quotes, there are so many words of wisdom and sayings that make us think.
How Your Thoughts Shape Your Destiny
Perhaps one of the most powerful thoughts on thinking is this …
“Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.” – Unknown
Now, let’s turn wisdom into action and fill your quiver with arrows of action, and fill your mental toolbox with a garden of insight in the form of pithy prose, one-liner reminders, and quotable quotes.
To make the most of these thinking quotes, see if you can find three thinking quotes that you can use in some way or at least make you think.
There are no right answers here, only growth and greatness.
Here’s to your excellence.
My 3 Favorite Thinking Quotes
I tend to refer to these 3 quotes quite a bit to remind people what great thinking means:
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
— Aristotle
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
— Mark Twain
Top 10 Quotes on Thinking
- “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” — William James
- “Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.” — Thomas Szasz
- “Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?” — Winnie the Pooh
- “Few minds wear out; more rust out.” — Christian N. Bovee
- “It is well for people who think, to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean.” — Luther Burbank
- “Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.” — Benjamin Lee Whorf
- “Misery is almost always the result of thinking.” — Joseph Joubert
- “Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic.” — Edward de Bono
- “Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “What we think, we become.” — Buddha
While that’s a useful bunch to have under your belt, and you may have heard of many of these before, now take a waltz through the garden below and be sure to stop and smell the thinking quotes that bloom brightest for you.
1. The Nature of Thinking, Mind, and Consciousness
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
— William James
“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”
— Thomas Paine
“A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
“A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.”
— Oscar Wilde
“An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.”
— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
“And these little things may not seem like much but after a while they take you off on a direction where you may be a long way off from what other people have been thinking about.”
— Roger Penrose
“Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.”
— Albert Einstein
“At a certain age some people’s minds close up; they live on their intellectual fat.”
–William Lyon Phelps
“Believing is easier than thinking. Hence so many more believers than thinkers.”
— Bruce Calvert
“Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.”
— Thomas Szasz
“Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?”
— Winnie the Pooh
“Doubt is not a pleasant state of mind, but certainty is absurd.”
— Voltaire
“Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.”
— Niels Bohr
“Few minds wear out; more rust out.”
— Christian N. Bovee
“Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.”
— George Bernard Shaw
“I am not what I think. I am thinking what I think.”
— Eric Butterworth
“I began to realize that thinking itself is nothing but the process of asking and answering questions.”
— Tony Robbins
“I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.”
— Arthur C. Clarke
“I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.”
— Albert Einstein
“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”
— George S. Patton
“If I look confused it is because I am thinking.”
— Samuel Goldwyn
If you keep thinking about what you want to do or what you hope will happen, you don’t do it, and it won’t happen.”
— Desiderius Erasmus
“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.”
— Bruce Lee
“It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”
— James Thurber
“It is neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.”
— William Shakespeare
“It is no good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of information loss and black holes, it was 29 years.”
— Stephen Hawking
“It’s not the events that shape my life that determine how I feel and act, but, rather, it’s the way I interpret and evaluate my life experiences.”
— Tony Robbins
“Logic teaches rules for presentation, not thinking.”
— Mason Cooley
“Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.”
— Ambrose Bierce
“Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.”
— Blaise Pascal
“Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
— Virginia Woolf
“Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.”
— David Herbert Lawrence
“Men can live without air a few minutes, without water for about two weeks, without food for about two months – and without a new thought for years on end.”
— Kent Ruth
“Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.”
— Virginia Woolf
“Misery is almost always the result of thinking.”
— Joseph Joubert
“Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.”
— Aldous Huxley
“Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic.”
— Edward de Bono
“My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.”
— Billy Connolly
“My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
“No amount of energy will take the place of thought. A strenuous life with its eyes shut is a kind of wild insanity.”
— Henry Van Dyke
“No matter where you go or what you do, you live your entire life within the confines of your head.”
— Terry Josephson
“No problem can be solved until it is reduced to some simple form. The changing of a vague difficulty into a specific, concrete form is a very essential element in thinking.”
— J. P. Morgan
“No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.”
—Voltaire
“Nothing comes merely by thinking about it.”
— John Wanamaker
“Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.”
— G.C. Lichtenberg
“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.”
— Carl G. Jung
“Our minds are lazier than our bodies.”
— François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
“Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”
— Carl Sagan
“Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.”
— James Thurber
“Some people get lost in thought because it’s such unfamiliar territory.”
— G. Behn
“Some people do not become thinkers simply because their memories are too good.”
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
“Sometimes I think and other times I am.”
— Paul Valéry
“Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte
“The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.”
— Thomas A. Edison
“The best way of forgetting how you think you feel is to concentrate on what you know you know.”
— Mary Stewart
“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”
— John Kenneth Galbraith
“The ‘how’ thinker gets problems solved effectively because he wastes no time with futile ‘ifs’.”
— Norman Vincent Peale
“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
“The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have.”
— John Locke
“The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.”
— Will Durant
“The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.”
— Albert Einstein
“Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.”
— Martin Heidegger
“Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.”
— Havelock Ellis
“Thinking is like loving and dying. Each of us must do it for himself.”
— Josiah Royce
“Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Thinking is one thing no one has ever been able to tax.”
— Charles Kettering
“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.”
— Henry Ford
“Thinking isn’t agreeing or disagreeing. That’s voting.”
— Robert Frost
“Thinking will not overcome fear but action will.”
— W. Clement Stone
“Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.”
– Plato
“There are two distinct classes of what are called thoughts: those that we produce in ourselves by reflection and the act of thinking and those that bolt into the mind of their own accord.”
— Thomas Paine
“Try not thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the soft inner part of the peel. The smell. Try and you can’t. The brain doesn’t process negatives.”
— Doug Coupland
2. Thinking, Action, Discipline & Results
“A real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken a new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.”
— Tony Robbins
“As you begin changing your thinking, start immediately to change your behavior. Begin to act the part of the person you would like to become. Take action on your behavior. Too many people want to feel, then take action. This never works.”
— John Maxwell
“If the track is tough and the hill is rough, thinking you can just ain’t enough!”
— Shel Silverstein
“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”
— C.S. Lewis
“Let your performance do the thinking.”
— Charlotte Bronte
“Positive anything is better than negative nothing.”
— Elbert Hubbard
“Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.”
— Zig Ziglar
“Principles and rules are intended to provide a thinking man with a frame of reference.”
— Karl Von Clausewitz
“Thoughts lead on to purpose, purpose leads on to actions, actions form habits, habits decide character, and character fixes our destiny.”
— Tryon Edwards
“To do anything truly worth doing, I must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger but jump in with gusto and scramble through as well as I can.”
— Og Mandino
“The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.”
— David Ogilvy
“The secret of living a life of excellence is merely a matter of thinking thoughts of excellence. Really, it’s a matter of programming our minds with the kind of information that will set us free.”
— Charles R. Swindoll
3. Thinking & Emotion, Happiness, Inner Life, Self-Mastery
“A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.”
— Soren Kierkegaard
“Better to be without logic than without feeling.”
— Charlotte Bronte
“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.”
— Rick Warren
“I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth’s follies – thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.”
— David Herbert Lawrence
“I like what the future holds. I don’t like thinking about the past.”
— John Cale
“Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.”
— Lao Tzu
“Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.”
— William James
“Man falls from the pursuit of the ideal of plan living and high thinking the moment he wants to multiply his daily wants. Man’s happiness really lies in contentment.”
— Mohandas Gandhi
“My hand is the extension of the thinking process – the creative process.”
— Tadao Ando
“Misery is almost always the result of thinking.”
— Joseph Joubert
“Most people are prisoners, thinking only about the future or living in the past. They are not in the present, and the present is where everything begins.”
— Carlos Santana
“Physiological response to thinking and to pain is the same; and man is not given to hurting himself.”
— Martin H. Fischer
“Pride is pleasure arising from a man’s thinking too highly of himself.”
— Baruch Spinoza
“Sad people dislike the happy, and the happy the sad; the quick thinking the sedate, and the careless the busy and industrious.”
– Horace
“Self-worth comes from one thing – thinking that you are worthy.”
— Wayne Dyer
“The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”
— Samuel Johnson
“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.”
— Marcus Aurelius
“We are formed and molded by our thoughts. Those whose minds are shaped by selfless thoughts give joy when they speak or act. Joy follows them like a shadow that never leaves them.”
— Buddha
“We teach people that they upset themselves. We can’t change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling and behaving today.”
— Albert Ellis
“Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.”
— William James
“You and I are not what we eat; we are what we think.”
— Walter Anderson
“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.”
— Marcus Aurelius
“When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.”
— Joseph Campbell
4. Thinking, Society, Politics, Freedom & Collective Life
“A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I am neither bitter nor cynical but I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
“I’m against fashionable thinking.”
— Herman Kahn
“I’ve never responded well to entrenched negative thinking.”
— David Bowie
“Most successful politician is he who says what the people are thinking most often in the loudest voice.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
“Ours is the age which is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.”
— Howard Mumford Jones
“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
— Soren Kierkegaard
“People who say they don’t care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don’t care what people think.”
— George Carlin
“Pressure is a word that is misused in our vocabulary. When you start thinking of pressure, it’s because you’ve started to think of failure.”
— Tommy Lasorda
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
— Alice Walker
“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”
— Martin Heidegger
“The reason why so few people are agreeable in conversation is that each is thinking more about what he intends to say than others are saying.”
— Francois de La Rochefoucauld
“Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.”
– Voltaire
“When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.”
— Thomas Paine
“When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed…”
— John Adams
“When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.”
— Carter G. Woodson
“You may think of it as the ticket to the good life… Think of it as your ticket to change the world.”
— Tom Brokaw
5. Creativity, Art, Science & Innovation
“Building art is a synthesis of life in materialized form. We should try to bring in under the same hat not a splintered way of thinking, but all in harmony together.”
— Alvar Aalto
“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity…”
— Ray Bradbury
“Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution…”
— Niels Bohr
“I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me… so natural to my way of being and thinking…”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
“I like to think of thoughts as living blossoms borne by the human tree.”
— James Douglas
“My hand is the extension of the thinking process – the creative process.”
— Tadao Ando
“Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”
— Carl Sagan
“Sometimes… the hands solve a mystery the intellect has struggled with in vain.”
— Carl Jung
“The best ideas come as jokes…”
— David Ogilvy
“The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.”
— Albert Einstein
“You must continue to gain expertise, but avoid thinking like an expert.”
— Denis Waitley
“You cannot simply put something new into a place… then use that knowledge along with contemporary thinking to interpret what you see.”
— Tadao Ando
“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”
— Alan Watts
6. Reading, Writing, Language & Thought
“A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.”
— Jerry Seinfeld
“I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking…”
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh
“I once tried thinking for an entire day, but I found it less valuable than one moment of study.”
— Xun Zi
“Language shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about.”
— Benjamin Lee Whorf
“Living is like tearing through a museum… you really start absorbing what you saw…”
— Audrey Hepburn
“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
— John Locke
“Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer
“Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.”
— Edmund Burke
“There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.”
— Clarence Day
“There are different rules for reading, for thinking, and for talking. Writing blends all three of them.”
— Mason Cooley
“The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought…”
— Norbet Platt
“Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.”
— William Zinsser
“Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.”
— Isaac Asimov
“Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.”
— Joseph Addison
7. Relationships, Others, Empathy & Thinking Beyond Self
“I really wish I was less of a thinking man and more of a fool not afraid of rejection.”
— Billy Joel
“I succeeded by saying what everyone else is thinking.”
— Joan Rivers
“It is by not always thinking of yourself… Until you make room in your life for someone as important to you as yourself, you will always be searching and lost.”
— Richard Bach
“Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.”
— Winston Churchill
“One ought to look a good deal at oneself before thinking of condemning others.”
– Moliere
“There is a magnet in your heart that will attract true friends… thinking of others first…”
— Paramahansa Yogananda
“Romance is thinking about your significant other, when you are supposed to be thinking about something else.”
— Nicholas Sparks
“To get others to come into our ways of thinking, we must go over to theirs…”
— William Hazlitt
“When I get ready to talk to people, I spend two thirds of the time thinking what they want to hear and one third…”
— Abraham Lincoln
8. Humorous, Playful & Lighthearted Views on Thinking
“A good listener is usually thinking about something else.”
— Kin Hubbard
“Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?”
— Winnie the Pooh
“Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
“I grew up thinking that whatever I wanted to do, I could do.”
— Victoria Principal
“I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.”
— Peter De Vries
“If the track is tough and the hill is rough, thinking you can just ain’t enough!”
— Shel Silverstein
“In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple…”
— Lao Tzu
“My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.”
— Billy Connolly
“Romance is thinking about your significant other, when you are supposed to be thinking about something else.”
— Nicholas Sparks
“Some people get lost in thought because it’s such unfamiliar territory.”
— G. Behn
“Sometimes I think and other times I am.”
— Paul Valéry
“There are some days I practice positive thinking, and other days I’m not positive I am thinking.”
— John M. Eades
“Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man. But they don’t bite everybody.”
— Stanislaw Lec
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