Top 636 Thinking Quotes

I can’t be told life is beautiful through a normal positive thinking book or a Hallmark movie; that language doesn’t work for me.

Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you’re thinking about it.

Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.

When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn’t a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.

My worst habit is opening the fridge and thinking: ‘I’d like to eat something.’

Political consequences have never really come into my thinking. I didn’t think about it when we made ‘Maurice’ or when I said first I would co-direct and then write the screenplay of ‘Call Me’. I was just making something I thought I would enjoy creating.

If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.

Leadership is a way of thinking, a way of acting and, most importantly, a way of communicating.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

I stopped thinking; I just go out, and everything is in the moment. I just stop thinking and start moving – you just gotta be you.

In a society that tries to standardize thinking, individuality is not highly prized.

As a long-time registered Democrat who started voting in the year of Watergate, I resent being taken for a ride to the place where anything goes and nothing matters. And especially where nothing matters less than clear thinking and straight talk.

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

I think we need to start thinking about grounding our moral systems in our biology.

I did not grow up thinking that I wanted to be an engineer. I had read some articles about girls becoming increasingly scientifically illiterate and that girls lacked confidence in their capabilities when it came to quantitative skills. And I just thought that was kind of wrong.

Canada has a passive-aggressive culture, with a lot of sarcasm and righteousness. That went with my weird messianic complex. The ego is a fascinating monster. I was taught from a young age that I had to serve, so that turned into me thinking I had to save the planet.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the difference between poetry and prose, and as I’ve experienced it, poetry is insistent. It allows for images and statements to operate in a single space and resonate powerfully without the application to be elaborated upon and narrated.

When Christians start thinking about Jesus, things start breaking down, they lose their faith. It’s perfectly possible to go to church every Sunday and not ask any questions, just because you like it as a way of life. They fear that if they ask questions they’ll lose their Christ, the very linchpin of their religion.

The Gospel is not a theory; the Gospel is not a philosophy or an idea; the Gospel is not a way of thinking or feeling. The Gospel is an event in history.

You’re thinking about a dish, you’re thinking about an ingredient, and in many ways, you end up becoming a naked chef in front of the customer, because what you put on the plate is you. It’s who you are and where you’ve been.

Filmmaking is not a one man show. It is not like I’m thinking something and they are expressing it. I try to pull the actor in and together we try to get the expression. It is not my thinking alone, it is our thinking. The actor also becomes a part of the thought process.

Thinking good thoughts is not enough, doing good deeds is not enough, seeing others follow your good examples is enough.

For me, filmmaking is not about making statements but about exposing human behavior so people are eager enough to start thinking on their own and make their own assumptions.

Back then, as a teenager, I kept thinking, why don’t the adults around here just say something? Say it so they know we don’t accept segregation? I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there’s no easy way to get it. You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, ‘This is not right.’

You take a number of small steps which you believe are right, thinking maybe tomorrow somebody will treat this as a dangerous provocation. And then you wait. If there is no reaction, you take another step: courage is only an accumulation of small steps.

I think intuition can be a form of answered prayer. You do the best you can – thinking, figuring, planning – and then you pray.

So much of performing is a mind game. You’re memorizing thousands of notes, and if you start thinking about it in the wrong way, everything can blow up in your face.

A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.

I’ve been thinking about a bank robbery my whole life.

Don’t ever criticize yourself. Don’t go around all day long thinking, ‘I’m unattractive, I’m slow, I’m not as smart as my brother.’ God wasn’t having a bad day when he made you… If you don’t love yourself in the right way, you can’t love your neighbour. You can’t be as good as you are supposed to be.

What you have, what you are – your looks, your personality, your way of thinking – is unique. No one in the world is like you. So capitalize on it.

It’s sort of a mental attitude about critical thinking and curiosity. It’s about mindset of looking at the world in a playful and curious and creative way.

My first year on ‘SNL’, I made $90,000 dollars. And I bought a red Corvette for $45,000 dollars. I’m thinking, ‘I’ve got 45 grand left!’ Taxes didn’t even come into my equation. At the end of the first year of making 90 grand I was 25, 30 in the hole. We live in this baller, spend-money culture.

I succeeded by saying what everyone else is thinking.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don’t let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it.

In the ’70s and ’80s, what private equity did is it changed corporate America. It started holding companies accountable, and for the first time managers started thinking like owners.

The capacity you’re thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.

When we lost Bobby, I would wake up in the morning and think, ‘He’s OK. He’s in Heaven, and he’s with Jack and a lot of my brothers and sisters and my parents.’ So it made it very easy to get through the day thinking he was OK.

It doesn’t pay to say too much when you are mad enough to choke. For the word that stings the deepest is the word that is never spoke, Let the other fellow wrangle till the storm has blown away, then he’ll do a heap of thinking about the things you didn’t say.

Don’t waste so much time thinking about how much you weigh. There is no more mind-numbing, boring, idiotic, self-destructive diversion from the fun of living.

The world of music is changing so dramatically every day, the way people hear music. It’s different. It’s a new day and requires new thinking.

I wake up in the morning thinking about victory, I go to sleep thinking about victory, so sometimes it might be hard. But I need to control myself more and, how can I say it politely? Just shut up instead of speaking on the radio.

The only thing that can save us as a species is seeing how we’re not thinking about future generations in the way we live.

Most people are prisoners, thinking only about the future or living in the past. They are not in the present, and the present is where everything begins.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

I think when you get older, things come along that you know are a test in some way of your ability to stay with it. And when e-mail came along, I was just going to fall in love with it. And I did. I can’t believe it now – it’s like one of those ex-husbands that you think, ‘What was I thinking?’

You can only do what you can do in this world. If you start thinking of all the white noise out there, I think you’ll go crazy.

Every time Wimbledon is on, I am thinking, ‘Yes, I could do the same and get out the racket.’ Sadly, not the same results.

All over the world, young males and females, schooled in the art of patriarchal thinking, are building an identity on a foundation that sees the will to do violence as the essential way to assert being.

Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else – very rarely to those who say to themselves, ‘Go to, now, let us be a celebrated individual!’.