A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
I knew I was a winner back in the late sixties. I knew I was destined for great things. People will say that kind of thinking is totally immodest. I agree. Modesty is not a word that applies to me in any way – I hope it never will.
Critical thinking is not something you do once with an issue and then drop it. It requires that we update our knowledge as new information comes in. Time spent evaluating claims is not just time well spent. It should be considered part of an implicit bargain we’ve all made.
Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.
My own thinking has evolved. You find Africanisms in American speech. You find an African influence on United States culture. There are all kinds of Africanisms in America, as you would expect, if you really thought about it… That whole thing is much broader; the influence is much broader than I first understood.
Don’t believe your own publicity. You can’t; you’ll start thinking that you’re better than you are.
I hate people thinking their city is unique, but there is a certain aura about Los Angeles; it’s not necessarily a beautiful thing, but it’s part of Harry Bosch.
What helps with aging is serious cognition – thinking and understanding. You have to truly grasp that everybody ages. Everybody dies. There is no turning back the clock. So the question in life becomes: What are you going to do while you’re here?
There is a dearth of thinking skills – people are taught what to think, not how.
Misery is almost always the result of thinking.
If you keep thinking about what you want to do or what you hope will happen, you don’t do it, and it won’t happen.
Talk to people in their own language. If you do it well, they’ll say, ‘God, he said exactly what I was thinking.’ And when they begin to respect you, they’ll follow you to the death.
My daughter’s the greatest thing that’s happened to me in my life and she turned me into a more responsible man, as opposed to just someone who’s a perpetual teenager, thinking you’re a man when you’re not.
I go to bed dreaming, thinking that I want to be the best in the octagon and be a champion.
When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality.
I’m someone who just likes being in my cave and thinking up weird stuff.
Short-term thinking is the greatest enemy of good government.
When I work, I’m thinking in terms of purely visual effects and relations, and any verbal equivalent is something that comes afterwards. But it’s inconceivable to me that I could experience things and not have them enter into my painting.
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
I was friends with Susan Sontag the last four years of her life. She had this amazing charisma and so much energy, but she had a sad little funeral in Montparnasse in Paris. It was rainy. It was all wrong. And I was thinking, ‘God, she loved life so much.’
But I was thinking of a way To multiply by ten, And always, in the answer, get The question back again.
When I was in my late teens, a couple of friends passed away suddenly. This was quite distressing, but after a while, as tends to happen when one is once or twice removed from grief, I stopped thinking about them all the time.
I think the secret is really observation. Well, if you observe what’s going on and try to figure out how people are thinking, I think you can always write something that people will understand.
There are days when my heart is troubled, and just being in the Lord’s presence and thinking about His love for me fills my heart with inexplicable peace and joy.
He was seriously thinking of becoming a monk. He thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument, but my instrument needed tuning, and we had to split.
When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.
When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.
The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.
I’m kind of a good girl – and I’m not. I’m a good girl because I really believe in love, integrity, and respect. I’m a bad girl because I like to tease. I know that I have sex appeal in my deck of cards. But I like to get people thinking. That’s what the stories in my music do.
Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Artists don’t talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it’s stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.
I want the little lassies who are thinking of going to a nightclub in Cardiff to stop to see what that guy’s screaming for, or Grandma to put her knitting down to see why that guy’s chatting about Alexander the Great. I’m after pulling in, whether it’s in Manila, Beijing or whatever, the biggest possible audience.
I remember thinking during those times that I wanted to write in a way where there are no rules.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
I’m having this conversation with you now. I’m talking, but I’m thinking, feeling, smelling, and moving. Yet I’m concentrating on what you’re saying. So that means there’s more things going on in the body than just the present thing that the person’s got you doing.
I love thinking of cartoon characters feeling really real feelings. And I love to do that, not just as a fan, but as a creator, so if people want to look for those levels, they’re actually there.
I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me – they’re cramming for their final exam.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the journey of my parents – just seeing the sacrifices they’ve made to allow me to do what I do. How much of a difference their sacrifices have made through the generations.
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.
When I’ve finished one project, I start thinking about the next.
When I was on TV in the ’80s, I wasn’t thinking, ‘There’s a 10-year-old kid watching this and in 15 years, he’s gonna be doing stuff that was influenced by me.’ I was trying to get my five minutes together. So now that those people are comedians and they’re influenced by me – it’s bizarre.
I’d love to go and I’d love to play for my country and go to a World Cup again. I’ve got to accept I’m not in the current squad and just think, ‘If I get it, it’s a bonus and I’ll give it everything.’ But it’s hard to do when you’ve been thinking a different way all your life.
Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.
I always voted at my party’s call, and I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
Walking is magic. Can’t recommend it highly enough. I read that Plato and Aristotle did much of their brilliant thinking together while ambulating. The movement, the meditation, the health of the blood pumping, and the rhythm of footsteps… this is a primal way to connect with one’s deeper self.
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
We’ll sort of get over the marriage first and then maybe look at the kids. But obviously we want a family so we’ll have to start thinking about that.
Cartography and geographic thinking are cool.
I’m living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.
I’m thinking of a legacy that I can be proud of and wealth that my grandchildren can use to go to college. So world domination – in terms of providing for my family – is absolutely my goal.
Ya know, right now the most important thing in my life is to make sure you understand that, first of all I thank God I’m alive today, and I mean that. I spent too many years of my life thinking that the big party was the whole thing.
The rule of law in place of force, always basic to my thinking, now takes on a new relevance in a world where, if war is to go, only law can replace it.
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
While I was still a boy, I came to the conclusion that there were three grades of thinking; and since I was later to claim thinking as my hobby, I came to an even stranger conclusion – namely, that I myself could not think at all.
I went to NYU thinking I was going to make a ‘Die Hard’ sequel, or maybe action and genre films for the studios, but I ended up falling in love with personal cinema.
I think people generally are lost, as they keep thinking about what is going to happen and what they have done. They are not alive anymore. The art of listening is missing. In their head, they are doing something else.
