"Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right."
— Henry Ford

"The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking."
— Albert Einstein

"Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think."
— Thomas A. Edison

"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled."
— Plutarch

"Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face."
— Augusten Burroughs

" I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms."
— Albert Einstein

"The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think."
— Horace Walpole

"Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Stop thinking, and end your problems."
— Laozi

"Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Thinking about something is like picking up a stone when taking a walk, either while skipping rocks on the beach, for example, or looking for a way to shatter the glass doors of a museum. When you think about something, it adds a bit of weight to your walk, and as you think about more and more things you are liable to feel heavier and heavier, until you are so burdened you cannot take any further steps, and can only sit and stare at the gentle movements of the ocean waves or security guards, thinking too hard bout too many things to do anything else."
— Lemony Snicket (The End)

""Poirot" I said. "I have been thinking."
"An admirable exercise my friend. Continue it.""
— Agatha Christie (Peril at End House)

"Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours."
— John Locke

""Whoever controls the media, controls the mind" "
— Jim Morrison

"Think before you speak. Read before you think."
— Fran Lebowitz (Metropolitan Life/Social Studies)

"People don’t like to think, if one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant."
— Helen Keller

"All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"You're mind is working at its best when you're being paranoid.
You explore every avenue and possibility of your situation
at high speed with total clarity."
— Banksy (Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall)

"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you."
— Harlan Ellison

"And of course, when you see your brother in the toilet bowl...there's a little voice that say, 'I wonder where he would go...'...if it hadn't been for his head..."
— Bill Cosby

""Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action comes, stop thinking and go in.""
— Napoleon Bonaparte

"Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that."
— Richard Dawkins

"Patience, he thought. So much of this was patience - waiting, and thinking and doing things right. So much of all this, so much of all living was patience and thinking."
— Gary Paulsen (Hatchet)

""If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a "moral commandment" is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.""
— Atlas Shrugged

"Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks.
"
— - Doug Larson

"According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency."
— Sam Harris

"The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind
about nothing -- to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts."
— John Keats

"The thought process can never be complete without articulation."
— Stephen King (The Stand)

"My dad said to me a few years ago: "There's no harm in thinking." We were talking about Crazy Uncle Albert and whether it was right to use your brain to build weapons.

He said, "You can't expect people not to think. Not to know things just because they COULD be bad."

I said, "Yeah, but then they built it and a hundred thousand people died."

My dad laughed and said there were a lot of steps between the thinking and the doing.

Which I know, duh. All I was saying is that when you think of doing something, you don't always know the consequences. For a while people THOUGHT about building the bomb, but nothing happened. In the end it was a lot of different people doing a lot of different things, most of which had nothing to do with the bomb, that did make it happen.

I think about that sometimes. Who was the person who had the first thought, the one that started it all?

And after they had the thought, what was the first thing they did?

I know my uncle never thought, Hey, all this great science- one day I'll use it to kill a whole bunch of people. You just look at his picture; he's not that kind of person.

And yet, I guess in a way he sort of is."
— Mariah Fredericks (Head Games)

"I could not think without writing."
— Jean Piaget

"Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare."
— Harriet Martineau

"Keep your heart clear
And transparent,
And you will
Never be bound.
A single disturbed thought
Creates ten thousand distractions."
— Ryokan

"There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking."
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

"It seems as if I can only thing if I write my journal, it just connects the part of my head that is busy doing things with the part that is busy thinking about everything else. I know all these pepole are so busy because they love each other and me. We are a noisy crowd of love (p. 210). "
— Nancy E. Turner (These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901 : A Novel)

"There s no time for confused thoughts. Practice the meaning of single-mindedness."
— Godrakpa

"He had been (Thinking? Praying?) It was all the same thing."
— Stephen King (The Stand)

""It was some time since I had gone to sleep in the same room with a girl. Of course, the room was large and reasonably well-lighted, and the girl had other things than me on her mind.""
— Ross MacDonald (The Blue Hammer)

"When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment."
— Peter Matthiessen

"Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare."
— -Harriet Martineau

"Question authority... Then ignore it! "
— Joseph Barjack