62 Thoughtful Quotes

In our fast-paced world, finding moments of reflection can be a luxury. Yet, these moments are essential for personal growth and emotional well-being. Quotes have a unique power to distill wisdom and insight into just a few words, offering guidance, inspiration, and a new perspective on life. In this post, we’ve curated a collection of the top 62 thoughtful quotes that will resonate with your heart and mind. Whether you’re seeking motivation, comfort, or a spark of creativity, these quotes are sure to provide the insight and encouragement you need.

1. “Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book...” - Dwight D. Eisenhower

2. “When people will not weed their own minds, they are apt to be overrun by nettles.” - Horace Walpole

3. “Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid ... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.” - Bertrand Russell

4. “Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.” - Isaac Asimov

5. “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” - George Orwell

6. “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” - Haruki Murakami

7. “Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery. It is far better to be free, to leave the forts and barricades of fear, to stand erect and face the future with a smile. It is far better to give yourself sometimes to negligence, to drift with wave and tide, with the blind force of the world, to think and dream, to forget the chains and limitations of the breathing life, to forget purpose and object, to lounge in the picture gallery of the brain, to feel once more the clasps and kisses of the past, to bring life's morning back, to see again the forms and faces of the dead, to paint fair pictures for the coming years, to forget all Gods, their promises and threats, to feel within your veins life's joyous stream and hear the martial music, the rhythmic beating of your fearless heart. And then to rouse yourself to do all useful things, to reach with thought and deed the ideal in your brain, to give your fancies wing, that they, like chemist bees, may find art's nectar in the weeds of common things, to look with trained and steady eyes for facts, to find the subtle threads that join the distant with the now, to increase knowledge, to take burdens from the weak, to develop the brain, to defend the right, to make a palace for the soul. This is real religion. This is real worship” - Robert Green Ingersoll

8. “Don't keep forever on the public road,going only where others have gone, and following one after the other like a flock of sheep. Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. 'Every time you do so you will be certain to find something that you have never seen before. Of course it will be a little thing, but do not ignore it. Follow it up, explore all around it; one discovery will lead to another, and before you know it you will have something worth thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the results of thought.” - Alexander Graham Bell

9. “I shudder at the thought of men....I'm due to fall in love again” - Dorothy Parker

10. “There is much in this vision that will remind you of your mystics; yet between them and us there is far more difference than similarity, in respect both of the matter and the manner of our thought. For while they are confident that the cosmos is perfect, we are sure only that it is very beautiful. While they pass to their conclusion without the aid of intellect, we have used that staff every step of the way. Thus, even when in respect of conclusions we agree with your mystics rather than your plodding intellectuals, in respect of method we applaud most your intellectuals; for they scorned to deceive themselves with comfortable fantasies.” - Olaf Stapledon

11. “So one can lose a good ideaby not writing it down, yet by losing it one can have it: it nourishes other asidesit knows nothing of, would not recognize itself in, yet when the negotiationsare terminated, speaks in the acts of that progenitor, and doesrecognize itself, is grateful for not having done so earlier.” - John Ashbery

12. “Tiny-perhaps." Rovender kept his eyes fixed on the rings. "Insignificant-never, Eva Nine. No living thing is insignificant.” - Tony DiTerlizzi

13. “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

14. “It is precisely by binding things together that traditional visions perpetuate themselves and the prejudgments contained within them; and it is by insisting on prising things apart that we have liberated ourselves from them” - Ernest Gellner

15. “A tornado of thought is unleashed after each new insight. This in turn results in an earthquake of assumptions. These are natural disasters that re-shape the spirit.” - Vera Nazarian

16. “Unlike a fountain that circulates the same water in an enclosed, perpetually recycling system, a human being circulates thoughts in an unlimited reservoir of self.Don't limit yourself to being a mere fountain when you contain an ocean.” - Vera Nazarian

17. “for he had acquired, as time went on, the firm conviction that any thought, even the most audacious, that any fiction, even the most insane, can one day materialize and see its fulfillment in space and time.” - Stefan Grabinski

18. “Like prepositional phrases, certain structural arrangements in English are much more important than the small bones of grammar in its most technical sense. It really wouldn't matter much if we started dropping the s from our plurals. Lots of words get along without it anyway, and in most cases context would be enough to indicate number. Even the distinction between singular and plural verb forms is just as much a polite convention as an essential element of meaning. But the structures, things like passives and prepositional phrases, constitute, among other things, an implicit system of moral philosophy, a view of the world and its presumed meanings, and their misuse therefore often betrays an attitude or value that the user might like to disavow.” - Richard Mitchell

19. “How frail the human heart must be―a mirrored pool of thought.” - Sylvia Plath

20. “All sins are forgiven once you start making a lot of money.” - Rupaul

21. “We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body.” - Yeats William B.

22. “Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life.” - Hermann Hesse

23. “Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

24. “Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.” - Steven Pinker

25. “I give no sources, because it is indifferent to mewhether what I have thought has already beenthought before me by another.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

26. “ABNORMAL, adj. Not conforming to standards in matters of thought and conduct. To be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested.A striving toward the straiter [sic] resemblance of the Average Man than he hath to himself, whoso attaineth thereto shall have peace, the prospect of death and the hope of Hell.” - Ambrose Bierce

27. “On the Bigotry of Culture:: it presented us with culture, with thought as something justified in itself, that is, which requires no justification but is valid by it's own essence, whatever its concrete employment and content maybe. Human life was to put itself at the service of culture because only thus would it become charged with value. From which it would follow that human life, our pure existence was, in itself, a mean and worthless thing.” - José Ortega y Gasset

28. “...new ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.” - Jonah Lehrer

29. “For God’s sake, let us be mennot monkeys minding machinesor sitting with our tails curledwhile the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.” - D.H. Lawrence

30. “Sure it will hurt. But so what? Pain is just a state of mind. You can think your way out of anything, even pain.” - Rodman Philbrick

31. “If her enemies were Brigan's friends and her friends were Brigan's enemies, then the two of them could walk through the world arm in arm and never be hit by arrows again.” - Kristin Cashore

32. “Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.” - Bertrand Russell

33. “Uncouth, clannish, lumbering about the confines of Space and Time with a puzzled expression on his face and a handful of things scavenged on the way from gutters, interglacial littorals, sacked settlements and broken relationships, the Earth-human has no use for thinking except in the service of acquisition. He stands at every gate with one hand held out and the other behind his back, inventing reasons why he should be let in. From the first bunch of bananas, his every sluggish fit or dull fleabite of mental activity has prompted more, more; and his time has been spent for thousands of years in the construction and sophistication of systems of ideas that will enable him to excuse, rationalize, and moralize the grasping hand.His dreams, those priceless comic visions he has of himself as a being with concerns beyond the material, are no more than furtive cannibals stumbling round in an uncomfortable murk of emotion, trying to eat each other. Politics, religion, ideology — desperate, edgy attempts to shift the onus of responsibility for his own actions: abdications. His hands have the largest neural representation in the somesthetic cortex, his head the smallest; but he's always trying to hide the one behind the other.” - M. John Harrison

34. “take a strict view of their excrements, and, from the colour, the odour, the taste, the consistence, the crudeness or maturity of digestion, form a judgment of their thoughts and designs; because men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent, as when they are at stool...” - Jonathan Swift

35. “It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.” - Don DeLillo

36. “…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?” - Updike, John

37. “You have to believe what you're saying if you're going to convince me. I just can't break that rule, even if I want to.” - Ashly Lorenzana

38. “To want to tackle everything rationally is irrational.” - Ilyas Kassam

39. “They sell courage of a sort in the taverns. And another sort, though not for sale, a man can find in the confessional. Try the alehouses and the churches, Hugh. In either a man can be quiet and think.” - Ellis Peters

40. “There is no unmoving mover behind the movement. It is only movement. It is not correct to say that life is moving, but life is movement itself. Life and movement are not two different things. In other words, there is no thinker behind the thought. Thought itself is the thinker. If you remove the thought, there is no thinker to be found.” - Walpola Rahula

41. “My own eyes try to sleep, but they don't. They stay wide awake as time snarls forward and silence drops down, like measured thought.” - Markus Zusak

42. “There is no such thing as self-awareness. Imagine thought retreating into itself to think about itself. It would be easier to imagine a revolver bullet extracting itself from its victim's wound and re-entering the barrel. Yes, it would be easier to imagine the universe's explosion suddenly halting its outflow of energy, so that the galaxies congeal once more, and the millions of light-years of their flight through space are immediately annulled.” - j.m.g. le clezio

43. “I began my studies with eagerness. Before me I saw a new world opening in beauty and light, and I felt within me the capacity to know all things. In the wonderland of Mind I should be as free as another [with sight and hearing]. Its people, scenery, manners, joys, and tragedies should be living tangible interpreters of the real world. The lecture halls seemed filled with the spirit of the great and wise, and I thought the professors were the embodiment of wisdom... But I soon discovered that college was not quite the romantic lyceum I had imagined. Many of the dreams that had delighted my young inexperience became beautifully less and "faded into the light of common day." Gradually I began to find that there were disadvantages in going to college. The one I felt and still feel most is lack of time. I used to have time to think, to reflect, my mind and I. We would sit together of an evening and listen to the inner melodies of the spirit, which one hears only in leisure moments when the words of some loved poet touch a deep, sweet chord in the soul that until then had been silent. But in college there is no time to commune with one's thoughts. One goes to college to learn, it seems, not to think. When one enters the portals of learning, one leaves the dearest pleasures – solitude, books and imagination – outside with the whispering pines. I suppose I ought to find some comfort in the thought that I am laying up treasures for future enjoyment, but I am improvident enough to prefer present joy to hoarding riches against a rainy day.” - Helen Keller

44. “Pengorbanan. Kau membuat pengorbanan. Aku membuat pengorbanan. Kita semua membuat pengorbanan. Tapi kau merasa marah atas pengorbanan yang kau berikan. Kau selalu memikirkan apa yang telah kau korbankan. Kau belum mengerti. Pengorbanan adalah bagian kehidupan. Harusnya begitu. Bukanlah sesuatu untuk disesali. Tapi sesuatu untuk didambakan.” - Mitch Albom

45. “Worry less about what other people think about you, and more about what you think about them.” - Fay Weldon

46. “Only in the world of mathematics do two negatives multiply into a positive.” - Abby Morel

47. “The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there’s a flood; and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gone under.” - C.S. Lewis

48. “I want to thank you for the profound joy I've had in the in the thought of you.” - Rosie Alison

49. “As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genuine rest, no one to talk to who was capable of understanding the complexity (simplicity) of the problem or the approaches to a tentative solution. There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or "terror in a lonely place," the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind. As a mathematician he was free from subjection to reality, free to impose his ideas and designs on his own test environment. The only valid standard for his work, its critical point (zero or infinity), was the beauty it possessed, the deft strength of his mathematical reasoning. THe work's ultimate value was simply what it revealed about the nature of his intellect. What was at stake, in effect, was his own principle of intelligence or individual consciousness; his identity, in short. This was the infalling trap, the source of art's private involvement with obsession and despair, neither more nor less than the artist's self-containment, a mental state that led to storms of overwork and extended stretches of depression, that brought on indifference to life and at times the need to regurgitate it, to seek the level of expelled matter. Of course, the sense at the end of a serious effort, if the end is reached successfully, is one of lyrical exhilaration. There is air to breathe and a place to stand. The work gradually reveals its attachment to the charged particles of other minds, men now historical, the rediscovered dead; to the main structure of mathematical thought; perhaps even to reality itself, the so-called sum of things. It is possible to stand in time's pinewood dust and admire one's own veronicas and pavanes.” - Don DeLillo

50. “What you powerfully holdIn your thought-worldWill make you eitherA street beggarOr a great king.” - Sri Chinmoy

51. “From time to time ponder whether you are unconsciously saying:'Truth is what I happen to be thinking at this moment.” - Idries Shah

52. “A prepared mind is always made up; it knows what it thinks and why it thinks that. When it's time to change, it just makes itself up a different way. A really made-up mind--made up properly, knowing what it knows and on what basis it knows it--is open. People close an undecided mind because they're trying to protect those sore uncertainties from getting bumped and scraped.” - John Barnese

53. “...отдыхать "вообще" невозможно. Нужно отдыхать от чего-то. Понимаешь? И если хорошо и отчётливо понять, отчего ты устал, то можно более эффективно отдохнуть.” - Евгений Гришковец

54. “Think like a man of action but act like a woman of thought.” - Amit Abraham

55. “A thought to ponder: If I couldn't use words to speak, what would my life be saying?” - Evinda Lepins

56. “If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good” - Ezra Pound

57. “I was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness; it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die.” - John Green

58. “As far as I am concerned, philosophic questioning is just as likely to make you confused and depressed as it is to improve your condition.” - Christopher Paolini

59. “Why did I come here? I thought. Why is it always only a matter of choosing between something bad and something worse?” - Charles Bukowski

60. “Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.” - Charles Darwin

61. “There are times when a man has need of the open heavens to compass his thoughts.” - Kathryn Worth

62. “I believe in the power of love, and planting positive thought seeds into the collective consciousness.” - jay woodman