You cannot escape the results of your thoughts. Whatever your present environment may be, you will fall, remain or rise with your thoughts, your vision, your ideal. You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspiration. -- James Allen

Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more. -- Henri Frederic Amiel

Thought, like all potent weapons, is exceedingly dangerous if mishandled. Clear thinking is therefore desirable not only in order to develop the full potentialities of the mind, but also to avoid disaster. -- Giles St. Aubyn

Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is the myth of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular! -- Honore de Balzac

Whatever failures I have known, whatever errors I have committed, whatever follies I have witnessed in private and public life have been the consequence of action without thought. -- Bernard Baruch

It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us unintelligibly, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous. -- Jean Baudrillard

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't "try" to do things. You simply "must" do things. -- Ray Bradbury

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world. -- Buddha

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind. -- Sir Winston Churchill

Minds are like parachutes; they work best when open. -- Lord Thomas Dewar

Nurture your mind with great thoughts. -- Benjamin Disraeli

My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. -- Albert Einstein

Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry. -- Havelock Ellis

Translated by Lydia Davis and published in volume 1 “Ethics” of “Essential Works of Foucault”, The New Press 1997. Copyright Paul Rabinow -- Michel Foucault

The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office. -- Robert Frost

Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts. -- José Ortega y Gasset

All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience. -- Johann von Goethe

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion – in the long run, these are the only people who count. -- Robert A. Heinlein

Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin. -- Hermann Hesse

“If I supply you with a thought, you may remember it and you may not. But if I can make you think a thought for yourself, I have indeed added to your stature.” -- Elbert Hubbard

You can lead a boy to college, but you cannot make him to think. -- Elbert Hubbard

What a peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call 'thought'. -- Hume

The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity. -- Søren Kierkegaard

When all men think alike, no one thinks very much. -- Walter Lippmann

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts. -- John Locke

Thinking: The talking of the soul with itself. -- Plato

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled. -- Plutarch

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking. -- Jerry Seinfeld

I believe in an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out. -- Arthur Hays Sulzberger

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives. -- Henry David Thoreau

Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness. -- James Thurber

Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to. -- Paul Ambroise Valery

The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merely to grasp the world, but to change it. -- Colin Wilson

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