67 Inspirational Thinking Quotes

In a world that's constantly evolving, finding inspiration can sometimes feel like a daunting task. Yet, the right words at the right time can spark a change in perspective, motivate action, and rekindle lost enthusiasm. This collection of 67 inspirational thinking quotes is meticulously curated to provide you with the guidance and encouragement needed to navigate life's challenges. Whether you're seeking a surge of creativity, a boost in confidence, or a reminder of the beauty in resilience, these quotes serve as powerful reminders of the boundless potential within each of us. Dive into this treasure trove of wisdom and let it illuminate your path to inspired thinking.

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

2. “The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.” - John Kenneth Galbraith

3. “The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mindabout nothing -- to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.” - John Keats

4. “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

5. “Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We’re talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled experience in economical ways. Let’s not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that’s all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.” - Don DeLillo

6. “Your mind is working at its best when you're being paranoid.You explore every avenue and possibility of your situationat high speed with total clarity.” - Banksy

7. “Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.” - John Locke

8. “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

9. “He who thinks little errs much…” - Leonardo da Vinci

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

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

12. “His prose, like the thinking it reveals, is full of cloudy suggestions of something beyond the range of mere cognition. He has been given power, if not over the entities and dyads, certainly over the ignorant and superstitious.” - Richard Mitchell

13. “But what is the way forward? I know what it isn't. It's not, as we once believed, plenty to eat and a home with all the modern conveniences. It's not a 2,000-mile-long wall to keep Mexicans out or more accurate weapons to kill them. It's not a better low-fat meal or a faster computer speed. It's not a deodorant, a car, a soft drink, a skin cream. The way forward is found on a path through the wilderness of the head and heart---reason and emotion. Thinking, knowing, understanding.” - Laurence Gonzales

14. “The thought process can never be complete without articulation.” - Stephen King

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

16. “We must begin thinking like a river if we are to leave a legacy of beauty and life for future generations.” - David Brower

17. “Never worry alone. When anxiety grabs my mind, it is self-perpetuating. Worrisome thoughts reproduce faster than rabbits, so one of the most powerful ways to stop the spiral of worry is simply to disclose my worry to a friend... The simple act of reassurance from another human being [becomes] a tool of the Spirit to cast out fear -- because peace and fear are both contagious.” - John Ortberg

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

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

20. “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

21. “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our thinking. Thus, we are drifting toward catastrophe beyond conception. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.” - Albert Einstein

22. “For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.” - Plato

23. “I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.” - Thomas Henry Huxley

24. “Dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical, more visual, and often more emotional than the thoughts of the day, but a thinking through of the day, nevertheless.” - Siri Hustvedt

25. “My dull brain was wrought with things forgotten.” - William Shakespeare

26. “Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.” - Fernando Pessoa

27. “We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

28. “My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them──by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents.” - Jane Austen

29. “You are moving on the chariot of your desire whatever you are thinking is always right.” - Santosh Kalwar

30. “Your language indicates──and limits──what you think.” - Jonathan Price

31. “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

32. “قانون الشريعة: بعدما قيل لهم أن الشريعة تجسد المثل الاسلامية العلياافترض غالبية المسلمين أن الشريعة مقدسة...يكتب ضياء الدين ساردار "ان القسم الأعظم من الشريعة ما هو الا الرأي الفقهي لفقهاء كلاسيكيين هذا هو السبب في أنه كلما فرضت الشريعة خارج سياق الزمن الذي وضعت فيه تكتسب المجتمعات الاسلامية احساسا قروسطيا.هذا هو ما نشهده في السعودية، ايران، السودان، افغانستان” - Irshad Manji

33. “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” - Steve Jobs

34. “I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.” - David Foster Wallace

35. “And Siobhan says people go on holidays to see new things and relax, but it wouldn’t make me relaxed and you can see new things by looking at earth under a microscope or drawing the shape of the solid made when 3 circular rods of equal thickness intersect at right angles. And I think that there are so many things just in one house that it would take years to think about all of them properly. And also, a thing is interesting because of thinking about it and not because of it being new.” - Mark Haddon

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

37. “The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

38. “...most people are almost blind and they don’t see most things and there is lots of spare capacity in their heads and it is filled with things which aren’t connected and are silly, like, “I’m worried that I might have left the gas cooker on.” - Mark Haddon

39. “The best ideas will eat at you for days, maybe even weeks, until something, some incident, some impulse, triggers you to finally express them.” - Criss Jami

40. “A conclusion is the place you get to when you’re tired of thinking.” - Jill Shalvis

41. “i go deeper into my head” - Robert Adamson

42. “Technically, you don't pay me.And technically, most of what I do is "think."I...rrr. ummm.And when you get right down to it, I'm better at it than you are.-Ennesby & Captain Tagon” - Howard Tayler

43. “Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.” - H. Jackson Brown Jr.

44. “For the first time she could see a man's head naked of its skull. Saw the cunning thoughts race in and out through the caves and promontories of his mind long before they darted through the tunnel of his mouth.” - Zora Neale Hurston

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

46. “I feel that all knowledge should be in the free-trade zone. Your knowledge, my knowledge, everybody's knowledge should be made use of. I think people who refuse to use other people's knowledge are making a big mistake. Those who refuse to share their knowledge with other people are making a great mistake, because we need it all. I don't have any problem about ideas I got from other people. If I find them useful, I'll just ease them right in and make them my own.” - Myles Horton

47. “Yet she was so sweet. She wasn’t a hard-ass, wasn’t jaded after all that had been done to her. In bed, she was giving and generous. And she smiled a lot. She seemed to enjoy life.Whereas he’d been nothing but a giant pain in the ass, taking for granted everything that had been given to him. He’d had it so easy, while his parents had struggled to give him a good life so all he had to do was go out and live his dream.He and Savannah were as different as night and day. How could she tolerate being around him? He was nothing but a spoiled football player who craved the spotlight. He didn’t deserve to be sharing a bed with her. She needed someone who cared for her, who thought of nothing but her, who’d give up everything just to give her the kind of life she deserved.He sucked in a breath and realized it was time he made some serious life changes. It was time to go all in and stop hesitating about the things he really wanted in his career. In his life.It was time to start taking some chances.” - Jaci Burton

48. “Your most important task as a leader is to teach people how to think and ask the right questions so that the world doesn't go to hell if you take a day off.” - Jeffrey Pfeffer

49. “Knowing and thinking exist for the sake of love -- for the sake of building people up in faith. Thinking that produces pride instead of love is not true thinking.” - John Piper

50. “God is not honored by groundless love. In fact, there is no such thing. If we do not know anything about God, there is nothing in our mind to awaken love. If love does not come from knowing God, there is no point in calling it love for God.” - John Piper

51. “My God, these Feeling types! ... Sensitive people are just tyrannical people - everybody else has to adapt to them.” - Marie-Louise von Franz

52. “Each "way of thinking" has its own shape and color, which wax and wane like the moon.” - Haruki Murakami

53. “You don’t have to stay trapped in your thoughts just because you think them.” - Doug Dillon

54. “It's only because I've lived with brothers that I realize, after a moment, that he's not looking outside but rather inside, wrestling with something inside himself. And there's nothing for it but to wait.” - Maggie Stiefvater

55. “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

56. “Why was it that her temper and her thinking never happened at the same time? Her temper behaved like a glutton sitting in an expensive restaurant ordering a hundred dishes, only to disappear when the bill came due. It left her lucid mind to do dishes.” - Ann Brashares

57. “The manlier you are, the harder it is to understand what a woman wants: there is not a hint of female brain in you.” - Criss Jami

58. “There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.” - Alain De Botton

59. “I beg your pardon; one knows exactly what to think.” - Jane Austen

60. “I need something, Wax. A place to look. You always did the thinking.”“Yes, having a brain helps with that, surprisingly.” - Brandon Sanderson

61. “You can think all you can but don't publicize all your thoughts” - Bernard Kelvin Clive

62. “The best protection against propaganda of any sort is the recognition of it for what it is. Only hidden and undetected oratory is really insidious. What reaches the heart without going through the mind is likely to bounce back and put the mind out of business. Propaganda taken in that way is like a drug you do not know you are swallowing. The effect is mysterious; you do not know afterwards why you feel or think the way you do.” - Mortimer Jerome Adler

63. “People think that they think things, and they also think that they know things. They could usefully give some attention to the question of whether they know what they think and know what they think they know.” - Idries Shah

64. “I swear to you that to think too much is a disease, a real, actual disease.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

65. “Imagination is thinking beyond language.” - Raheel Farooq

66. “It only takes one thought in one moment to alter the course of your life.” - Mark O'Brien

67. “Saving a worthy relationship is easier than trying to start a new one.” - Dennis E. Adonis