Quotes on Thinking

What other people think of me is none of my business. One of the highest places you can get to is being independent of the good opinions of other people.

Olive's private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as "big bursts" and "little bursts." Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.

but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probably, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt.

I'm going to keep going until I succeed — or die. Don't think I don't know how this might end. I've known it for years.

I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.

Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.

I don't want to think that the stories are finite; I want to feel that they can go on forever.

The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical.

I cannot help thinking that the menace of Hell makes as many devils as the severe penal codes of inhuman humanity make villains.

I don't think about whether people will remember me or not. I've been an ok person. I've learned a lot. I've taught people a thing or two. That's what's important.

Your own soul is nourished when you are kind; it is destroyed when you are cruel.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of 'success' as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, 'schooling,' but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prison.

She seemed to think that one of the perks of marriage was that it gave you rights of comment and intrusion over single people's love lives.

It is so powerful when we can leave behind our ordinary identities, no longer think of ourselves primarily as a conductor, or writer, or salesclerk, and go to a supportive environment to deeply immerse in meditation practice.

exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.

I don't like to give the sob story: growing up in a single-parent home, never knew my father, my mother never worked, and when friends came over I'd hide the welfare cheese. Yo, I failed ninth grade three times, but I don't think it was necessarily 'cause I'm stupid. I didn't go to school. I couldn't deal.

It's not to much fun to know yourself too well or think you do - everyone needs a little conceit to carry them through &amp past the falls.

I don't think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.

The strongest affection and utmost zeal should, I think, promote the studies concerned with the most beautiful objects, most deserving to be known.

I think it's important, if you are an artist, to use your music to stand up for what you believe in.