Quotes about Thinking

How many students who make it into the liberal arts and into philosophy classes still only manage to comprehend the content of these courses dogmatically, as simplisms to "believe"? Instead of grasping principles and values and an aristic ethos of clarity, they still only hear what pleases and flatters them: they grasp in Socrates or Plato the "countercultural" overtones that enable them to shower abuse on the diseased culture of their parents or peers, but they don't grasp at all the overwhelming obligation for themselves not to lie in orthodoxy's bed of sloth. They substitute, as opinionizers and slaves will do, one orthodoxy for another, imagining that the processes of "enlightenment" will change only the matter they think about and not the form of their own activity in reasoning. 

Man is made or unmade by himself. In the armory of thought he forges the weapons by which he destroys himself. He also fashions the tools with which he builds for himself heavenly mansions of joy and strength and peace

When you choose to understand [and] exercise control over the functions and attributes of your own mind, you will be empowered to create your own reality, to be completely self-reliant and totally prosperous.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

The modern "world" only exists or functions as an apparent self-coherent and universally extensive "world-order" insofar as its conventionalisms, conformisms and orthodoxies are profoundly and systematically mistaken for something other than the ideological (ulteriorly motivated, extrinsically utilitarian) constructs that they actually are: their validity hinges utterly on a mass of profoundly defeated or pathetic slacker-mentalities incompetent from childhood to discriminate the modality "artificial" or "willful" from the modalities "natural," "divine," "metaphysical," "rational," "fated," "transcendent," "authoritative," etc. In modernity's ingeniously self-presupposing or petitio-principii structures and media, the pathos ("false consciousness" or complacency/pliability) of nearly all denizens of its dysculture is an exactly reciprocal measure of the suppression, demoralization, or extermination of residual aristoi or their values and culture of aristeia. I can't put the structure of our contemporary "social controls" on "thinking" much more concisely or nakedly than that.

Nearly every major decision of my business career was, to some degree, the result of daydreaming. ... To be sure, in every case I had to collect a lot of data, do detailed analysis, and make a data-based argument to convince superiors, colleagues and business partners. But that all came later. In the beginning, there was the daydream. By daydreaming, I mean loose, unstructured thinking with no particular goal in mind. ... In fact, I think daydreaming is a distinctive mode of cognition especially well suited to the complex, 'fuzzy' problems that characterize a more turbulent business environment. ... Daydreaming is an effective way of coping with complexity. When a problem has a high degree of complexity, the level of detail can be overwhelming. The more one focuses on the details, the more one risks being lost in them. ... Every child knows how to daydream. But many, perhaps most, lose the capacity as they grow up.

"If you don't think outside of the box, you may just get stuck inside of a cubicle."

The approach to it  ( Mind, Absolute, Void, Buddha Nature, Enlightenment )  is called the Gateway of the Stillness beyond all Activity.  If you wish to understand, know that a sudden comprehension comes when the mind has been purged of all the clutter of conceptual and discriminatory thought-activity.  Those who seek the truth by means of the intellect and learning only get further and further away from it.  Not till your thoughts cease all their branching here and there, not till you abandon all thoughts of seeking for something, not till your mind is motionless as wood or stone, will you be on the right road to the Gate.

Thinking before speaking can eliminate embarrassment.

Thinking before acting often eliminates the need to apologize.

It has been said that we think then act, but in reality we act then rationalize our actions.

Whatever you're thinking about is literally like planning a future event. When you're worrying, you are planning. When you are appreciating, you are planning...What are you planning? 

No one can look either our planet or our societies in the face and imagine humans are in any respect as rational as they have been mass-bamboozled into believing that they are. All the abstractions in terms of which we "think" about ourselves are free-floating and autonomous conformisms and orthodoxies, irrationalist self-complacencies and self-flattery that manifest the disconnectivity and dissociativity typifying banauseia; we will continue past the several points-of-no-return imagining in abstracto that, of course, we must necessarily possess the faculties to reverse any mistaken policies and cure any destruction. But the problem does not lie ultimately anywhere outside our own intrinsic and self-biased idiotia, our primordial and primally blind characters. To have a character blithely oblivious to the nature and concept of one's character is the doom of the vast majority of "mankind."

"Cynicism," like "heresy" and "heterodoxy" and "atheism" and "agnosticism" and "paganism" and "heathenism," is above all else a way for organized orthodoxy's caste of official censors to encyst and segregate and thus neutralize all contrarian forms of seeing and thinking, all (necessarily implicitly) prohibited and repressed ways of exercising disruptive and iconoclastic intuition and intellection (for to analyze and explain these things too openly is to give them publicity and potential cogency when the point is to asphyxiate them).

We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.

"If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking." "You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming." "When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream."

In most mentalities language is just fashionable or banal clothing (rarely finery) that obscures the evidence of natural and human reality; it is a programmatic form of mutual or collective self-deception, a grand conspiracy of untruth or denial.  Language is a mere tool of mere banausic or utilitarian mentalities, for the most part, who are perfectly closed upon themselves.  A fulfilled mind is (as Hegel saw) an infinity-generator, open to its own incalculable richness; and it is so self-possessed that it understands the workings of its own expressive liabilities, and can parry these temptations and set them aside to see things more scrupulously.  What passes for objectivity is for the most part an absurdity, a noxious faith that holds people in the webbing of orthodoxy.  No one escapes his own gravity-traps of subjective self without prodigious philosophical energies.

Most people traffic in abstractions and generalizations because they are grossly incompetent at culturing their intuition or powers of evidency, refining it to grasp the Thisness (Haecceitas) of what is before them.  Thinking is like a Stradivarius that has more potential variations in how it is played than any human can finitely perform or capture.

The music of all the different media of life--memories, images, feeling-tones, poetic-musical connotations of phrasing--is kaleidoscopic and doesn't repeat itself or recur.  --People who think they are trapped in a river of regularized and ever-repeating time are merely the victims of their own ordinarizing minds that have elaborated for them a prison-cell of everydayness.  The fountains of time, history, life, inspiration, etc. are fresh every instant, if one knows how to grasp them with some finesse: every instant within natural, historical, and personal time is unique.

The only measures that count are progress over your own self, and triumph over the vacant abstractions that most people mistake for thinking.

This activity of consciousness-the establishment of control in the world of things through conceptualization, rational thought, and the development of discipline and the abstractive repression of emotions-is an utterly vital and indispensable phase of psychic development. It leads from psychic primitive infancy to adulthood. Mythological tradition likens this development to the creation of the world from the original chaos to the establishment of a foothold on dry land away from the threat of drowning in the flood waters. Yet it is not the "dry land" of rational consciousness that contains and supports the ocean but conversely: the waters of the ocean contain the dry continents, and life upon them depends upon the waters. Similarly, it it the unconscious psyche, that gives rise to and maintains the world of consciousness. Consciousness with its concepts is a relatively minor part of the total psychic functioning, and in terms of dynamics certainly not the most powerful one. It establishes fixed points of rational reference-but at the price of a loss of emotional connection. Images, on the other hand, constellate emotional and imaginative qualities and thus reconstitute a connection which the abstractive process has severed.

Every thought is good unless it's the refusal of thinking.

All That Is loves us so dearly, we have the freedom to dismiss wishful thinking without batting an eye.  Now that's the power of wishful thinking.

"How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing.
Try to do your duty, and you'll now right away what you amount to. And what
is your duty?  Whatever the day calls for."

~~Goethe~~

I subscribe to Hellenic existential values, which is to say, nothing is truly "understood" in any penetrating or rational way until it has been traced back to its implications for ultimate values. Moralizing in the most profound and synoptic way should be the primary challenge for modern philosophers, a way of recovering the kind of articulated value-intelligence that ancient culture exercised. For most moderns there are no such things as foundational values or principles; there are only feelings, vagrant or idiosyncratic emotionalisms. To "think" in a merely abstract or conceptualizing way, free of the tasks of connoisseurial and spiritual evaluation, is in truth already a form of delusionality just in itself: it is the error that Kant describes of a bird realizing how much resistance the wind causes for it, and imagining that if only it were in empty space it could fly ever so much better. Hegel's understanding of the task of philosophy "in medias res"--having to come to see and understand not in a hypothetical vacuum or laboratory conditions in vitro but amidst the turbulence and conflicts of actual historical existence--is the only ultimately sane, rational, and humanly responsible method.

I am caught in a terrific bind of characterologically and rationally needing to think in the most comprehensive terms possible, forming a continuous system of argument with a gradient that runs from concrete to abstract, and unfortunately being caught also in a culture in which hardly anyone seems capable of applying himself to understand such a demanding form of argumentation.

It's quite easy to imagine one grasps the essential outlines of an issue once one has cleared away all the emotional and moral turbulence that interfere with thinking about it--but in those greenhouse-conditions one is not truly thinking about reality as it actually is. Modern "academic" or "scholarly" philosophy is the victim of the delusionality of "scientism" or "objectivity," of thinking supposing that the controversiality or polemicality of our lives can be effectively purged out of things. We can cosmeticize it, depress its strife and tension with a facade of pseudo-neutralized terms; but even the most meager forms of insight suffice to reveal that this objectivity is mere facade. Modern culture is becalmed in a Sargasso Sea of sophisticated relativism, a mentality that hasn't got a clue what to do about perspectival variations and rationalizations from one mind to another. If there isn't a consensual community about what is right or good, then bourgeois society can only seek forms of mediation or compromise or count the votes of its countless subrational idiots. To wrestle with fundamental norms and principles is not something intellectually respectable among bourgeois minds, any more than it is to make public and direct value-judgments about someone else's thinking. By default we sink into a morass of incommensurable and pathetic views.

When it becomes a part of every man's thinking that a single thought can change the polarity of our entire body toward either life or death - and can likewise change its entire chemistry toward increasing alkalinity or acidity to strengthen it or weaken it - or can change the shape of every corpuscle of matter in the entire body in the direction of either growth or decay - then the medical profession will radically change both its principles and its practices with the ailment of bodies.

It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?