Quotes on Thinking

I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others... I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent.

Irreverence ran on both sides of our family...my parents brought me up to think we could all change the world.

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes. Genuine ignorance is profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, can't terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas.

There are people who think that plunder loses all its immorality as soon as it becomes legal. Personally, I cannot imagine a more alarming situation.

Philosophy takes as her aim the state of happiness...she shows us what are real and what are only apparent evils. She strips men's minds of empty thinking, bestows a greatness that is solid and administers a check to greatness where it is puffed up and all an empty show; she sees that we are left no doubt about the difference between what is great and what is bloated.

So long as I am acting from duty and conviction, I am indifferent to taunts and jeers. I think they will probably do me more good than harm.

I think the guys who are really controlling their emotions ... are going to win.

We should live as if we were in public view, and think, too, as if someone could peer into the inmost recesses of our hearts-which someone can!

Everyone thinks that the principal thing to the tree is the fruit, but in point of fact the principal thing to it is the seed.

On some nights, he has nowhere to sleep, on others he suffers from insomnia. "That's just how it is," thinks the warrior. "I was the one who chose to walk this path."

I think the next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humor in it.

We are, first of all, not solitary creatures and second of all, we are deeply embedded in the lives of others. It's very easy to forget that and to engage in an atomistic fallacy - where we think that all we have to do is study the individual components of a system in order to understand the system. That's clearly not the case when it comes to social systems.

Any man who is really a man must learn to be alone in the midst of others, to think alone for others, and, if necessary, against others.

We the living, should not think of the dead as lonely because if they could speak to us, they would say: "Do not weep for me, earth was not my true country, I was an alien there: I am at Home where everyone comes."

Often have I sighed to measure By myself a lonely pleasure,- Sighed to think I read a book, Only read, perhaps, by me.

And I honor the man who is willing to sink half his present repute for the freedom to think, and, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak.

I think there will come a time when civilized people will look back in horror on our generation and the ones that have preceded it; the idea that we should eat other living things running around on four legs, that we should raise them just for the purpose of killing them! The people of the future will say 'meat-eaters' in disgust and regard us in the same way that we regard cannibals and cannibalism.

I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.

The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs.

To follow foolish precedents, and wink With both our eyes, is easier than to think.

I can never think of promoting my convenience at the expense of a friend's interest and inclination.