86 Profound Thinking Quotes

In a world that's constantly moving and evolving, it's important to take a moment to pause and reflect on the deeper aspects of life. Our curated collection of 86 profound thinking quotes is designed to inspire introspection and encourage you to explore new perspectives. These quotes, from some of the greatest minds and influential figures throughout history, offer timeless wisdom and thought-provoking insights. Whether you're seeking motivation, clarity, or a fresh viewpoint, these quotes invite you to delve into the complexities of the human experience and nurture a more thoughtful and intentional life. Join us on this journey of profound thinking and let these words resonate with your inner reflections.

1. “Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.” - Voltaire

2. “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.” - Henry Ford

3. “I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

4. “The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.” - Horace Walpole

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

6. “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

7. “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” - Nancy E. Turner

8. “The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.” - William Francis Butler

9. “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

10. “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

11. “Most of our so-called thinking processes are devoted to finding excuses for going on believing as we already do. ” - Herbert M Shelton

12. “Our life depends on the kind of thoughts we nurture. If our thoughts are peaceful, calm, meek, and kind, then that is what our life is like. If our attention is turned to the circumstances in which we live, we are drawn into a whirlpool of thoughts and can have neither peace nor tranquility.” - Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica

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

15. “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

16. “You will always be the answer, when somebody asks me what I'm thinking about.” - Lisa Brooks

17. “We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them” - Albert Einstein

18. “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

19. “Here is a truth that most teachers will not tell you, even if they know it: Good training is a continual friend and a solace; it helps you now, and assures you of help in the future. Good education is a continual pain in the neck, and assures you always of more of the same.” - Richard Mitchell

20. “There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.” - Isaac D'Israeli

21. “Thinking very often resembles napping, but the intent is different. --Stephanie Plum” - Janet Evanovich

22. “At Learning's fountain it is sweet to drink, But 'tis a nobler privilege to think.” - John Godfrey Saxe

23. “The alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all.” - P.B. Medawar

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. “Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.” - Voltaire

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

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

28. “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

29. “A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years.” - Byron Katie

30. “The inconsistencies that haunt our relationships with animals also result from the quirks of human cognition. We like to think of ourselves as the rational species. But research in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics shows that our thinking and behavior are often completely illogical. In one study, for example, groups of people were independently asked how much they would give to prevent waterfowl from being killed in polluted oil ponds. On average, the subjects said they would pay $80 to save 2,000 birds, $78 to save 20,000 birds, and $88 to save 200,000 birds. Sometimes animals act more logically than people do; a recent study found that when picking a new home, the decisions of ant colonies were more rational than those of human house-hunters. What is it about human psychology that makes it so difficult for us to think consistently about animals? The paradoxes that plague our interactions with other species are due to the fact that much of our thinking is a mire of instinct, learning, language, culture, intuition, and our reliance on mental shortcuts.” - Hal Herzog

31. “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.

32. “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

33. “Start writing by thinking, not wrestling with words.” - Jonathan Price

34. “That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.” - Nicole Krauss

35. “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

36. “In sum, then, "thinking about thinking" has to be a principal ingredient of any empowering practice of education.” - Jerome S. Bruner

37. “The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.” - Pat Conroy

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

39. “Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening” - Terence McKenna

40. “Whenever I think of something but can't think of what it was I was thinking of, I can't stop thinking until I think I'm thinking of it again. I think I think too much.” - Criss Jami

41. “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

42. “If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.” - Richard Buckminster Fuller

43. “Her eyes burrow into my forehead like greedy grubs that want to feed off my private thoughts.” - Emlyn Chand

44. “Why were there no words that spoke positively about being concerned about the self? Why was there only negative connotation in terms like "selfish", "self-interested", "self-centred", "self-obsessed" and so on? Why was it so much better to be without a self: "selfless", "self-sacrificing", "self-effacing", etc?” - A.J. Dalton

45. “We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste, — sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar….” - Henry David Thoreau

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

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

48. “The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That's the troublewith women, too." ["Existence" (1975)]” - Joanna Russ

49. “weren’t you alwaysdistracted by expectation, as if every eventannounced a beloved? (Where can you find a placeto keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside yougoing and coming and often staying all night.)…” - Rainer Maria Rilke

50. “Because, as we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And it’s also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we’re not so sure about.” - John Cleese

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

52. “I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.” - Warren Buffett

53. “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

54. “Les idées sont le contraire de la pensée.” - Albert Camus

55. “l'espace de l'esprit, là où il peut ouvrir ses ailes, c'est le silence.(chapitre XXIII, dernière phrase)” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

56. “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

57. “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

58. “Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.” - Baruch de Spinoza

59. “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

60. “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

61. “It doesn’t matter what you think, what you believe or what you feel the only thing that ultimately matters is what you do.” - Zubair Ahmed

62. “A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle.” - G.K. Chesterton

63. “Thinking goes on in your head. It is not really deep into the roots of your being; it is not your totality.” - Osho

64. “We realize we can't go around saying and doing what we're actually thinking and feeling. If we all did that, life would be a lunatic asylum. Indeed, that's how you know you're talking to a lunatic. Lunatics are those poor souls who have lost their inner communication and so they allow themselves to say and do exactly what they are thinking and feeling and that's why they're mad.” - Robert McKee

65. “Running is a mental sport, more than anything else. You're only as good as your training, and your training is only as good as your thinking.” - Lauren Oliver

66. “They Want You To Be A Docile Apathetic Consumer” - Bill Hicks

67. “...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

68. “From time to timeI once wondered how one wanders from time to timeAnd think up the paradox lineSpeak of Epoch's crimeOh I lied, it hasn't happened yetBut bet you better believe it's such a habit thatI just said that in a past mindset” - Criss Jami

69. “It seems that we had...not a better education, per se, but perhaps more incentive to use it. They learn, but they hardly think.” - Ilona Andrews

70. “Feelings should never supersede rational thought... so, if you feel that you've got the answer, you should think some more.” - Julie Ann Elliott-Morton

71. “There are no dead ends in life, only dead end thinking.” - Orrin Woodward

72. “The less you think and the more you do, the better things tend to become.” - Silvia Hartmann

73. “Your thoughts are transparent.” - Wayne Gerard Trotman

74. “For the Stoics, then, our judgments about the world are all that we can control, but also all that we need to control in order to be happy; tranquility results from replacing our irrational judgments with rational ones” - Oliver Burkeman

75. “Having a sense of purpose is having a sense of self. A course to plot is a destination to hope for.” - Bryant McGill

76. “Quem não lê, não pensa, e quem não pensa será para sempre um servo.” - Paulo Francis

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

78. “We naturally think from our own perspective, from a point of view which tends to privilege our position. Fairness implies the treating of all relevant viewpoints alike without reference to one's own feelings or interests. Because we tend to be biased in favor of our own viewpoint, it is important to keep the standard of fairness at the forefront of our thinking. This is especially important when the situation may call on us to see things we don't want to see, or give something up that we want to hold onto.” - Linda Elder

79. “Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.” - Hannah Arendt

80. “The best kind of conversation is that which may be called thinking aloud.” - William Hazlitt

81. “There are too many things around us, preventing us from thinking well! To think well, sometimes we need a heavy fog!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

82. “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

83. “My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.” - Sylvia Plath

84. “The power of reason is thought small in these days, but I remain an unrepentant rationalist. Reason may be a small force, but it is constant, and works always in one direction, while the forces of unreason destroy one another in futile strife. Therefore every orgy of unreason in the end strengthens the friends of reason, and shows afresh that they are the only true friends of humanity.” - Bertrand Russell

85. “Travelling, whether in the mental or the physical world, is a joy, and it is good to know that, in the mental world at least, there are vast countries still very imperfectly explored” - Bertrand Russell

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