56 Inspiring Quotes On Thinking

In a world constantly pushing for quick decisions and fast-paced lifestyles, the art of deep and thoughtful reflection often gets overshadowed. Yet, profound thinking can be the key to personal growth, innovation, and understanding the complexities of life. To inspire and ignite your cognitive curiosity, we've compiled a curated list of the top 56 quotes that celebrate and emphasize the power of thinking. Whether you're looking for motivation, a fresh perspective, or simply a moment to pause and reflect, these quotes offer timeless wisdom that can transform your mindset and enrich your daily life. Dive in and let these words of wisdom guide you on a journey of intellectual and personal discovery.

1. “Whoever controls the media, controls the mind” - Jim Morrison

2. “Why should things be easy to understand?” - Thomas Pynchon

3. “The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. A second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. A first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.” - A.A. Milne

4. “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

5. “Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.” - Harriet Martineau

6. “Thinking is a bit uncomfortable, but you'll get used to it. A matter of time and practice.” - Lloyd Alexander

7. “It's not entirely absurd to think that somewhere in the past of mankind someone, for the first time, did in his mind the equivalent of putting an adjective to a noun, and saw, not only a relationship, but this special relationship between two things of different kinds....In sum, all the seemingly complicated kinds of modification in English are just ways of thinking and seeing how things go with each other or reflect each other. Modifiers in our language are not aids to understanding relationships; they are the ways to understand relationships. A mistake in this matter either comes from or causes a clouded mind. Usually it's both.” - Richard Mitchell

8. “Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits...” - A.A. Milne

9. “Thinking doesn't pay. Just makes you discontented with what you see around you.” - Robert A. Heinlein

10. “If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change.” - Ray Bradbury

11. “The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.” - Ray Bradbury

12. “What you keep before your eyes will affect you.” - Joel Osteen

13. “We are set in our ways, bound by our perspectives and stuck in our thinking.” - Joel Osteen

14. “The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.” - E. M. Cioran

15. “The spirit of the individual is determined by his dominating thought habits.” - Bruce Lee

16. “No brain at all, some of them [people], only grey fluff that's blown into their heads by mistake, and they don't Think.” - A.A. Milne

17. “Thinking is not a thing that can undo itself. It can never be its own solution.” - Zach Plague

18. “Words make you think. Music makes you feel. A song makes you feel a thought.” - Yip Harburg

19. “Groceries, you need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select what clothes you're gonna wear every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That's the only thing you should be trying to control. Drop everything else but that. Because if you can't learn to master your thinking, you're in deep trouble forever.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

20. “And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: "Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity. "The ideas Earthlings held didn't matter for hundreds of thousands of years, since they couldn't do much about them anyway. Ideas might as well be badges as anything."They even had a saying about the futility of ideas: 'If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.' "And then Earthlings discovered tools. Suddenly agreeing with friends could be a form of suicide or worse. But agreements went on, not for the sake of common sense or decency or self-preservation, but for friendliness."Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead. And even when they built computers to do some thinking for them, they designed them not so much for wisdom as for friendliness. So they were doomed. Homicidal beggars could ride.” - Kurt Vonnegut

21. “How ghastly for her, people actually thinking, with their brains, and right next door. Oh, the travesty of it all.” - Gail Carriger

22. “Intellectual labor is a common technique for the avoidance of thinking.” - Peter Straub

23. “If thinking is your fate, revere this fate with divine honour and sacrifice to it the best, the most beloved” - Friedrich Nietzsche

24. “Life is difficult.” - M. Scott Peck

25. “Wit and puns aren't just decor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.” - Adam Gopnik

26. “Keep on reading, thinking, doing and writing! Words keep introducing their friends to you.” - Toba Beta

27. “I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.” - Ernest Hemingway

28. “Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought; underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation.” - Thomas Carlyle

29. “I am a buyer of blank books. Kids find it interesting that I would buy a blank book. They say, "Twenty-Six dollars for a blank book! Why would you pay that?" The reason I pay twenty-six dollars is to challenge myself to find something worth twenty-six dollars to put in there. All my journals are private, but if you ever got hold of one of them, you wouldn't have to look very far to discover it is worth more than twenty-six dollars” - Jim Rohn

30. “To think is to be sick...” - Djuna Barnes

31. “...the proper response to a lousy idea is not to stop thinking. It is to come up with a better idea.” - Kevin Kelly

32. “I was thinking lots of things, but most of them needed to stay thoughts, not words.” - Maggie Stiefvater

33. “Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.” - Criss Jami

34. “Nothing is as it seems, but something is everything it is made out to be.” - Carroll Bryant

35. “Thinking can only serve to measure out the helplessness of thought.” - H. Rider Haggard

36. “The only freedom you truly have is in your mind, so use it.” - M.T. Dismuke

37. “Places are people as well as rocks, trees and buildings. Places are moments in time.” - A.J. Dalton

38. “You know the minute you stop thinking about it, it'll happen.” - Sarah Dessen

39. “التفكير هو الذي جعل الإنسان يتطور. فالإنسان تطور عندما أدرك ما الذي حوله. عندما فهم. وحلل. وربط واكتشف. وأول ما اكتشف: ذاته..” - أنيس منصور

40. “فكر قبل أن تتكلم، واقرأ قبل أن تفكر” - Fran Lebowitz

41. “The coach who goes home and doesn't think about the game he just lost is bound to repeat his mistakes.” - Keith Cooper

42. “The author indicts "our culture's rush toward efficiency, speed, quantification, and distraction" and counters with the value of "the time and attention required to find the best words and images and then hold them together in ways that illuminate. This, she diagnoses, "is now wildly countercultural. It is inefficient. Its value is not readily quantifiable. Its utility is intangible.” - Cherie Harder

43. “If I didn't know you I would say I don't know you.” - Jaime Cabrera

44. “philosophes qui ont pu autrefois se soustraire de l'empire de la fortune, et, malgré les douleurs et la pauvreté, disputer de la félicité avec leurs dieux. Car s'occupant sans cesse à considérer les bornes qui leur étaient prescrites par la nature, ils se persuadaient si parfaitement que rien n'était en leur pouvoir que leurs pensées, que cela seul était suffisant pour les empêcher d'avoir aucune affection pour d'autres choses; et ils disposaient d'elles si absolument qu'ils avaient en cela quelque raison de s'estimer plus riches, et plus puissants, et plus libres, et plus heureux qu'aucun des autres hommes, qui, n'ayant point cette philosophie, tant favorisés de la nature et de la fortune qu'ils puissent être, ne disposent jamais ainsi de tout ce qu'ils veulent. (partie 3, para 4)” - René Descartes

45. “The humility of wisdom is the happy consciousness that all things come from God, are sustained by God, and exist for God. This wisdom is rooted in the pride-destroying, joy-giving cross of Christ.” - John Piper

46. “Loving God with all our mind means that our thinking is wholly engaged to do all it can to awaken and express the heartfelt fullness of treasuring God above all things.” - John Piper

47. “Amanda olhou para ele - Tens de compreender que já não sou a rapariga que era dantes. Sou casada e sou mãe e, tal como toda a gente, não sou perfeita. Debato-me com as escolhas que fiz e cometo erros e passo grande parte do tempo a interrogar-me sobre quem sou realmente ou se a minha vida tem algum significado sequer. Não sou de modo nenhum uma pessoa especial, Dawson, e tens de perceber isso. Tens de compreender que sou apenas... uma pessoa vulgar.” - Nicholas Sparks

48. “Las personas con un alto nivel de tolerancia al aburrimiento tienen tiempo de sobra para pensar.” - Stephen King

49. “...most people in the world don't really use their brains to think. And people who don't think are the ones who don't listen to others.” - Haruki Murakami

50. “There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn't. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say ‘I think’ we don't leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.” - Jeanette Winterson

51. “And so we keep on thinking, because the next thought might be the answer.” - Jonah Lehrer

52. “By the second day, the song lyrics had faded, but in their place came darker irritations. Gradually, I started to become aware of a young man sitting just behind me and to the left. I had noticed him when he first entered the mediation hall, and had felt a flash of annoyance at the time: something about him, especially his beard, had struck me as too calculatedly dishevelled, as if he were trying to make a statement. Now his audible breathing was starting to irritate me, too. It seemed studied, unnatural, somehow theatrical. My irritation slowly intensified - a reaction that struck me as entirely reasonable and proportionate at the time. It was all beginning to feel like a personal attack. How much contempt must the bearded meditator have for me, I seethed silently, deliberately to decide to ruin the serenity of my meditation by behaving so obnoxiously? Experienced retreat-goers, it turns out, have a term for this phenomenon. The call it 'vipassana vendetta'. In the stillness tiny irritations become magnified into full-blown hate campaigns; the mind is so conditioned to attaching to storylines that it seizes upon whatever's available. Being on retreat had temporarily separated me from all the real causes of distress in my life, and so, apparently, I was inventing new ones. As I shuffled to my narrow bed that evening, I was still smarting about the loud-breathing man. I did let go of the vendetta eventually - but only because I'd fallen into an exhausted and dreamless sleep” - Oliver Burkeman

53. “Flexibility is a requirement for survival.” - Roger Von Oech

54. “When I awake thinking of dreams I slept on, I often wonder, if the dreams ever wake up thinking of me?” - Anthony Liccione

55. “...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.” - David Foster Wallace

56. “Almost everything a person thinks is a lie, and an assault against the natural soul.” - Bryant McGill