Quotes on Thinking

Writing is linear and sequential; Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z. The hard part of writing isn't the writing; it's the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?

The positive thing about writing is that you connect with yourself in the deepest way. You get a chance to know who you are, to know what you think. You begin to have a relationship with your mind.

One's life and passion may be elsewhere, but New York is where you prove if what you think in theory makes sense in life.

I'm thinking only of my illness and my health, though both, the first as well as the second, are you.

I think the most insulting thing you can do to a director is to challenge when he or she is satisfied with your interpretation.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

The interesting question is, how do you put yourself in a position so that you can allow ‘what is’ to be. The enemy turns out to be the creation of mind. Because when you are just in the moment, doing what you are doing, there is no fear. The fear is when you stand back to think about it. The fear is not in the actions. The fear is in the thought about the actions.

In a way, I think religion is to be admired for asking the right questions. I just think it's got the wrong answers.

If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.

One of the big mistakes I think we make in relationships is that we don't give our best energy to the people that matter most.

I think it is quite dangerous for an organisation to think they can predict where they are going to need leadership. It needs to be something that people are willing to assume if it feels relevant, given the context of any situation

I think a major act of leadership right now, call it a radical act, is to create the places and processes so people can actually learn together, using our experiences

As long as we are flippant and stupid and shallow and think that we know ourselves, we shall never give ourselves over to Jesus Christ; but when once we become conscious that we are infinitely more than we can fathom, and infinitely greater in possibility either for good or bad than we can know, we shall be only too glad to hand ourselves over to Him.

A giraffe is so much a lady that one refrains from thinking of her legs, but remembers her as floating over the plains in long garb, draperies of morning mist her mirage.

Today it is the skeptics who are the social conformists, though because of powerful intellectual propaganda they continue to enjoy thinking of themselves as wildly individualistic and unbearably bright.

I ask the fundamental question of rationality: Why do you believe what you believe? What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?

Art's a staple. Like bread or wine or a warm coat in winter. Those who think it is a luxury have only a fragment of a mind. Man's spirit grows hungry for art in the same way his stomach growls for food.

I don’t like to badmouth people. But I’m the head of a monarchy that began in the ninth century, and I’m apparently more modern than Chris Christie. Look, I know he has to appeal to the crazy right-wingers in his party, but the fact is, he’s not as forward-thinking as an eighty-seven-year-old lady who wears a crown on her head. It’s pathetic.

People change what they do less because they are given an analysis that shifts their thinking than because they are shown a truth that influences their feelings.

Goodness in words creates trust, goodness in thinking creates depth, goodness in giving creates love.

To work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before