Quotes on Thinking

Sooner or later, false thinking brings wrong conduct.

Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?

It is perfectly possible to live a very moral life without a belief in God, and I think it's perfectly possible to live a life peppered with ill-doing and believe in God.

I think television has betrayed the meaning of democratic speech, adding visual chaos to the confusion of voices. What role does silence have in all this noise?

What makes art Christian art? Is it simply Christian artists painting biblical subjects like Jeremiah? Or, by attaching a halo, does that suddenly make something Christian art? Must the artist’s subject be religious to be Christian? I don’t think so. There is a certain sense in which art is its own justification. If art is good art, if it is true art, if it is beautiful art, then it is bearing witness to the Author of the good, the true, and the beautiful

I don't believe in religion. I believe the example of Christ. I believe in the example of a perfect human being that if you can live for other people away from yourself you will be happy. If you live for yourself you will be unhappy and then you will not be able to sleep or do anything else... finally. I think insofar, and I really believe this, insofar as people do live with the other fellow [God] in mind, they have to be happy you know? Because it raises you up.

Why should all life be work, when we all can borrow. Let's think only of today, and not worry about tomorrow.

I do not think homosexuality is immoral.

If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing . . . then you are a writer.

They said we were soft, that we would not fight, that we could not win. We are not a warlike nation. We do not go to war for gain or for territory; we go to war for principles, and we produce young men like these. I think I told every one of them that I would rather have that medal, the Congressional Medal of Honor, than to be President of the United States.

The future hasn't happened yet and the past is gone. So I think the only moment we have is right here and now, and I try to make the best of those moments, the moments that I'm in.

A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction - a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse.

When you think of the blur of all the brands that are out there, the ones you believe in and the ones you remember, like Chanel and Armani, are the ones that stand for something. Fashion is about establishing an image that consumers can adapt to their own individuality. And it's an image that can change, that can evolve. It doesn't reinvent itself every two years.

First of all, do any of you here think it's a crime to help a suffering human end his agony? Any of you think it is? Say so right now. Well, then, what are we doing here?

Why do so many of us not give ourselves permission to be alive until we are absolutely assured that we will die? ...If we are not in [this present millisecond of life and conscious experience], we are not alive; we are merely thinking our lives. Yet we have seen so many die, looking back over their shoulders at their lives, shaking their heads and muttering in bewilderment, "What was that all about?"

Feeling will get you closer to the truth of who you are than thinking. I cannot tell you anything that deep within you don't already know. When you have reached a certain stage of inner connectedness, you recognize the truth when you hear it. If you haven't reached that stage yet, the practice of body awareness will bring about the deepening that is necessary.

To experience anything fully and see it clearly there must be a moment of presence where conceptual thinking is not interfering with your experience of that moment.

I've seen the real extreme diva behaviour and I don't think that's who I am.

Thoughts are fine when you don't confuse them with who you are, and then thoughts are not a problem. Thinking is a wonderful tool to create things in this world. It only becomes problematic and a source of suffering when you confuse thinking with who you are.

I think jazz is a beautiful, democratic music. It encourages musicians with very strong, and many times, very different points of view to work together as a team while, at the same time, giving them the space to express their individuality. It's a very important art form and can be used as a model for different cultures to work together.