Quotes on Thinking

Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

I think that this is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.

Children are born innocent. Before they are domesticated they live in the moment, love without fear, and don't even think about the opinions of others.

The idea of an entrepreneur is really thinking out of the box and taking risks and stepping up to major challenges.

When you have to prove the value of your ideas by persuading other people to pay for them, it clears out an awful lot of woolly thinking.

I'd like to think that when I sing a song, I can let you know all about the heartbreak, struggle, lies and kicks in the ass I've gotten over the years for being black and everything else, without actually saying a word about it.

The true lover of learning then must his earliest youth, as far as in him lies, desire all truth.... He whose desires are drawn toward knowledge in every form will be absorbed in the pleasures of the soul, and will hardly feel bodily pleasures I mean, if he be a true philosopher and not a sham one ... Then how can he who has the magnificence of mind and is the spectator of all times and all existence, think much of human life He cannot. Or can such a one account death fearful No indeed.

It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them.

Writing a book is a tremendous experience. It pays off intellectually. It clarifies your thinking. It builds credibility. It is a living engine of marketing and idea spreading, working every day to deliver your message with authority. You should write one.

I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research.

The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.

The writer must always leave room for the characters to grow and change. If you move your characters from plot point to plot point, like painting by the numbers, they often remain stick figures. They will never take on a life of their own. The most exciting thing is when you find a character doing something surprising or unplanned. Like a character saying to me: ‘Hey, Richard, you may think I work for you, but I don’t. I’m my own person.’

When you have two alternatives, the first thing you have to do is to look for the third that you didn't think about, that doesn't exist.

Four things for success: work and pray, think and believe.

If you're determined to think of yourself as limited, fearful, vulnerable, or scarred by past experience, know only that you have chosen to do so. The opportunity to experience yourself differently is always available.

It’s so easy to think that we’re the only ones who suffer, while other people are somehow immune to pain, as though they’d been born with some kind of special knowledge about being happy, that, through some cosmic accident, we never received. Thinking in this way, we make our own problems seem much bigger than they really are.

The interesting adults are always the school failures, the weird ones, the losers, the malcontents, this isn’t wishful thinking. It’s the rule.

In any case, life is beautiful, extremely beautiful. And when you are old you appreciate it more. When you are older you think, you remember, you care and you appreciate. You are thankful for everything. For everything.

It is humanity's destiny to explore the universe. When we start thinking and working on that cosmic level, we will transcend our parochial differences and tribal natures and become global creatures, solar system creatures. Then we will figure out where we fit in.

Forged in the fires of human passion, choking on the fumes of human rage, with these out hells and our heavens, so few inches apart, we must be awfully small, and not as strong as we think we are.

It is one of those simple but beautiful paradoxes of life: When a person feels that he is truly accepted by another, as he is, then he is freed to move from there and to begin to think about how he wants to change, how we wants to grow, how he can become different, how he might become more of what he is capable of being.