Quotes about Thinking

For him who has no concentration, there is no tranquility.

Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency.

And when you try too hard, it doesn't work. Try grabbing something quickly and precisely with a tensed-up arm; then relax and try it again. Try doing something with a tense mind. The surest way to become Tense, Awkward, and Confused is to develop a mind that tries too hard--one that thinks too much.

Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems.

People who are on a spiritual quest don't think, they simply want results.

And all these questions I ask myself. It is not in a spirit of curiosity. I cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin - more even than death... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.

Probably no one of us has the True Religion. But all of us together - if we are allowed to be free - are discovering ways of conversing about the great mysteries. The pretense to know all the answers to the deepest mysteries is, of course, the grossest fraud. And any people who declare a Jihad, a holy war on unbelievers - those who do not share their believers' pretended omniscience - are enemies of thinking men and woman and of civilization. I see religion as only a way of asking unanswerable questions, of sharing the joy of a community of quest, and solacing one another in our ignorance.

How can one become enlightened in one single moment? One can, because one is enlightened -- one just has to recognize the fact. It is not something that happens from the outside, it is something that arises from the inside. It has always been there but you were clouded, you were full of thoughts.

Love dispels fear just as light dispels darkness. If even for a moment you have been in love with someone, fear disappears and thinking stops. With fear thinking continues. The more you are afraid, the more you have to think.

Meditation is not contemplation because it is not thinking at all – consistent, inconsistent, crazy, sane. It is not thinking at all; it is witnessing. It is just sitting silently deep within yourself, looking at whatsoever is happening inside and outside both. Outside there is traffic noise, inside there is also traffic noise -- the traffic in the head. So many thoughts – trucks and buses of thoughts and trains and airplanes of thoughts, rushing in every direction. But you are simply sitting aloof, unconcerned, watching everything with no evaluation.

Meditation means removing all your prejudices, putting all your conclusions aside, seeing without any hindrance, seeing without any curtains, seeing clearly without any mediation of any thought, seeing without Buddha standing between you and reality, or Krishna, or Christ.

We live in conflict because our thinking is in conflict. We have organized ourselves into rigidly-defined categories based upon race, ethnicity, nationality, ideology, religion, economic interests, geography, and countless other identities, and vigorously defend the boundaries of such categories from those outside. Politics mobilizes such identities, promising each of these groups the coercive backing of the state to advance their interests.

Problems only exist in the human mind.

Enlightenment means rising above thought, not falling back to a level below thought, the level of an animal or a plant. In the enlightened state, you still use your thinking mind when needed, but in a much more focused and effective way than before.

It wasn't through the mind, through thinking, that the miracle that is life on earth or your body were created and are being sustained.

Thoughts are just what is. They appear. They're innocent. They're not personal. They're like the breeze or the leaves on the trees or the raindrops falling. Thoughts arise like that, and we can make friends with them. Would you argue with a raindrop?

True intelligence does not derive from thought.  True intelligence uses thought.

Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

If thinking is existing, then knowing is creating, and creativity is a desperate grasp at something far beyond the confines of our simplistic reality.

I never thought of that before!
It's my opinion that you never think at all.

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

There are certain things in which one is unable to believe for the simple reason that he never ceases to feel them. Things of this sort — things which are always inside of us and in fact are us and which consequently will not be pushed off or away where we can begin thinking about them — are no longer things; they, and the us which they are, equals A Verb; an IS.

When you think more of the external things of life than that which is within, you create in consciousness a tendency to dwell on the surface
Iam Mabel

Americans are cultured from their earliest years to be either one-sided douloi or one-sided banausoi, i.e. either they cannot think abstractively/conceptually/orchestrally or else they can only think abstractively. Thinking in a truly rational dialectic between intuition and intellect is just beyond the reach of our nation of emotionalist helots. What prevails among us truly has to be called not thinking but "thinking," a pathetic surrogate for actual thinking for the benefit of existentially or modally crippled mentalities.

You know, the brute reality (as darkling Heraclitus perceived so many centuries ago) is that in the vast majority of human lives, the mind is not actually an asset but a liability; humans on the whole are only apt to injure themselves through the deployment of their attempts at thinking, because thinking is a sublime art at which far more is likely to go wrong than to go right by blind chance. To encourage people indiscriminately to "think more for themselves" is therefore highly irresponsible if not catastrophic. It is actually a boon, in normal social and historical circumstances, that so many humans allow others to think for them-a boon when they live in something other than a predatory and mendacious social order, a society aristic enough on the whole to bear up fiduciary responsibilities for its undercastes. Alas, moderns try to practice this thinking-for-oneself in the most culturally impoverished of all cultures and the most amorally atomistic of all societies.

Don`t let what other people think decide who you are.

Life provides me both the right and the responsability of continuously adapting my way of thinking.

Aimed at as something terminal or ultimate or absolute, quiescence is, from the standpoint of life, a form of death, a stillness and inertia, an impassivity. Life is infinite sensitivity to all things, the quicksilver sympatheticism of everything that belongs in the natural cosmos. The mind and will do close out or exclude extraneous distractions as a means to their powers of self-concentration ("Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies," Buckminster Fuller). But Buddhism makes this quiescence not a means but an end in itself, incompatible as it may be with the very life of spirit and of will. Taken as a mere exercise or tonic, it has an utterly different value of course.