Last Updated: March 18, 2023 by Quote.cc Team
Thinking is a cognitive process that involves mental activity to process information, generate ideas, solve problems, make decisions, and form opinions or beliefs. It is a complex process that involves different stages, such as perception, attention, memory, reasoning, and creativity.
Perception is the first stage of thinking, where sensory information from the environment is received and interpreted by the brain. Attention is the next stage, where the mind focuses on specific information and filters out irrelevant information. Memory is the stage where the brain retrieves relevant information from past experiences to make connections and associations with current information. The reasoning is the stage where the brain processes information to form conclusions and make judgments. Creativity is when the brain generates new and original ideas and solutions.
There are different types of thinking, including critical, analytical, creative, and reflective thinking. Critical thinking involves analyzing and evaluating information to make informed decisions and solve problems. Analytical thinking involves separating complex information into smaller parts to understand it better. Creative thinking involves generating new and original ideas and solutions. Reflective thinking consists of thinking about past experiences to gain insights and improve.
Thinking skills can be developed and improved through practice and experience. Reading, writing, problem-solving, and decision-making can help build thinking skills. It is also essential to be open-minded, curious, and willing to explore new ideas and perspectives to expand one’s thinking.
Thinking is a skill that you can develop throughout your lifetime. We can draw from the wisdom of the ages and modern sages to build our thinking skills. And quotes are one of the best ways to do that. Here are 380 best thinking quotes collection will help you achieve a new perspective in your daily life.
380 Inspirational Quotes On Thinking
Top 10 Thinking Quotes
“A truth, an insight, which you have slowly and laboriously puzzled out by thinking for yourself could easily have been found already written in a book; but it is a hundred times more valuable if you have arrived at it by thinking for yourself.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
“An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
“Don’t just teach your students to read. Teach them to question what they read, what they study. Teach them to doubt. Teach them to think.” – Richard Feynman
“Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.” – Thomas A. Edison
“I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think.” – Warren Buffett
“I like thinking big. If you’re going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big.” – Donald Trump
“Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering – because you can’t take it in all at once.” – Audrey Hepburn
“The pleasures arising from thinking and learning will make us think and learn all the more.” – Aristotle
“To know what people really think, observe what they do, not what they say.” – René Descartes
“When I get ready to talk to people, I spend two thirds of the time thinking what they want to hear and one third thinking about what I want to say.” – Abraham Lincoln
What Is Thinking?
“Thinking isn’t agreeing or disagreeing. That’s voting.” – Robert Lee Frost
“Thinking is the talking of the soul with itself.” – Plato
“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.” – Henry Ford
“Thinking is the greatest torture in the world for most people.”
“Thinking is the ability to strip away what doesn’t matter from a situation so you can see what does matter.” – Shane Parrish
“Thinking is one thing no one has ever been able to tax.” – Charles Kettering
“Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Thinking is like loving and dying. Each of us must do it for himself.” – Josiah Royce
“Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.” – Carl Jung
“Thinking is by far the most underrated activity. People consider it unproductive to sit on a bench and think. So they spend their lives doing things they never thought through. An hour of clear thinking can yield a conclusion that changes your life.” – Johnny Uzan
“Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“There is a kind of work which any man can do, but from which many men shrink, generally because it is very hard work. It is called thinking.” – G.K. Chesterton
“Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.” – Plato
“Thoughts aren’t really fixed realities, but simply movements of the mind that is thinking.” – Mingyur Rincpoche
“Writing is thinking. I rarely know what I think about something until I write about it.” – James Clear
Short Thinking Quotes
“Those who know how to think need no teachers.” – Mahatma Gandhi
“The best thinking is rethinking.” – Shane Parrish
“Schedule time to think.” – Shane Parrish
“Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.” – Lorraine Hansberry
“Let your performance do the thinking.” – Charlotte Bronte
“I’m against fashionable thinking.” – Herman Kahn
“I think, therefore I am.” – René Descartes
“What we think, we become.” – Buddha
“Think any way you please, but know why.” – Martin H. Fischer
“Writing well is thinking well.” – David Perell
“Being scared is caused mostly by thinking.” – David Foster Wallace
“Belief is when someone else does the thinking.” – Buckminster Fuller
“Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.” – Thomas Szasz
“Every thought we think is creating our future.” – Louise Hay
“Don’t write to put your ideas down; write to think.” – Kevin Kelly
“Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Fear overrides all rational thinking.” – Greg Secker
“For the busy mind it is painful to stop and think.” – Shane Parrish
“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.” – Rick Warren
“I am not what I think. I am thinking what I think.” – Eric Butterworth
“I don’t care what people think, because people don’t think.” – Kanye West
“If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.” – Benjamin Franklin
“If I look confused it is because I am thinking.” – Samuel Goldwyn
“In order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive.” – Jordan Peterson
“It is neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.” – William Shakespeare
“Just think of happy thoughts and you’ll fly.” – Peter Pan
“Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.” – Winston Churchill
“Misery is almost always the result of thinking.” – Joseph Joubert
“My hand is the extension of the thinking process – the creative process.” – Tadao Ando
“No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.” – Voltaire
“Nothing comes merely by thinking about it.” – John Wanamaker
“Pen, ink and paper and a sitting posture are great helps to attention and thinking.” – John Adams
“Pointless thinking is worse than no thinking at all.” – Haruki Murakami
“Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.” – Carl Sagan
“Sit in silence and reflect. Learn how to think without being told what to think.” – Ed Latimore
“Sometimes I think and other times I am.” – Paul Valéry
“Stop thinking, and end your problems.” – Lao Tzu
“Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.” – Joseph Addison
“The best way to minimize risk is to think.” – Shane Parrish
“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.” – John Kenneth Galbraith
“The less men think, the more they talk.” – Montesquieu
“The more tired you are, the more susceptible you become to short-term thinking.” – Brian Norgard
“The soul never thinks without a picture.” – Aristotle
“There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.” – Thomas A. Edison
“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” – William Shakespeare
“There’s nothing like actually writing something out to clarify thinking.” – Warren Buffett
“Think before you speak. Read before you think.” – Fran Lebowitz
“We are better at finding information than thinking about it.” – Shane Parrish
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein
“When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.” – Plato
“When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
“When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.” – Carter G. Woodson
“Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.” – Walter Lippmann
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.” – Henry Ford
“Write what you think, not what you think you’re supposed to think.” – Jack Butcher
“Wise? No, I simply learned to think.” – Christopher Paolini
“Writing is formalized thinking.” – Jordan Peterson
“Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.” – William Zinsser
“You don’t have to torture your consciousness with endless thinking.” – Jack Kerouac
“You sort of start thinking anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.” – J. K. Rowling
“A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes.” – Mahatma Gandhi
“An opinion should be the result of thought, not a substitute for it.” – Jef Mallett
“Anxiety is thought without control. Flow is control without thought.” – James Clear
“Ours is the age which is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.” – Howard Mumford Jones
“Believing is easier than thinking. Hence so many more believers than thinkers.” – Bruce Calvert
Positive Thinking Quotes
“Writing is not the most important thing; thinking is. But writing is probably the best way to improve your thinking.” – Matt Mullenweg
“I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“I like to think of thoughts as living blossoms borne by the human tree.” – James Douglas
“I am neither bitter nor cynical but I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
“I began to realize that thinking itself is nothing but the process of asking and answering questions.” – Tony Robbins
“Hold your council before dinner; the full belly hates thinking as well as acting.” – Benjamin Franklin
“I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of thinking and enjoying what they call living, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.” – Jack Kerouac
“I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.” – Arthur C. Clarke
“I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.” – Georgia O’Keeffe
“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.” – Arnold Schwarzenegger
“I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.” – Anne Morrow Lindbergh
“A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.” – Jerry Seinfeld
“The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.” – Thomas A. Edison
“I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.” – Albert Einstein
“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” – George Orwell
“If you can think and speak and write, you are absolutely deadly, nothing can get in your way.” – Jordan Peterson
“It is no good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of information loss and black holes, it was 29 years.” – Stephen Hawking
“Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.” – Benjamin Lee Whorf
“Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.” – Ambrose Bierce
“Man falls from the pursuit of the ideal of plan living and high thinking the moment he wants to multiply his daily wants. Man’s happiness really lies in contentment.” – Mohandas Gandhi
“Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.” – Virginia Woolf
“Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic.” – Edward de Bono
“No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.” – Henry David Thoreau
“Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think.” – Benjamin Disraeli
“Our task is not so much discovery as rediscovery. What one needs is not so much thinking as remembering. Sometimes it suffices to sit quietly and listen well, when venerable men have thought before us. Constant forgettings of truths once perceived are the very charm of the human mind; the history of human thought is nothing more than the story of these forgettings and rememberings and forgettings again.” – Lin Yutang
“People don’t like to think, if one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.” – Helen Keller
“People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is actually done by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it.” – Anthony de Mello
“Perhaps the logical conclusion of everyone looking the same is everyone thinking the same.” – Scott Westerfeld
“Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action comes, stop thinking and go in.” – Napoleon Bona
“The best way of forgetting how you think you feel is to concentrate on what you know you know.” – Mary Stewart
“The best way to think new thoughts is to deliberately set aside time for thinking new thoughts.” – Matthew Kobach
“The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. A second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. A first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.” – A.A. Milne
“Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!” – Dr. Seuss
“Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.” – Havelock Ellis
“To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult of all.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.” – Thomas Paine
“To do anything truly worth doing, I must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in with gusto and scramble through as well as I can.” – Og Mandino
“I like what the future holds. I don’t like thinking about the past.” – John Cale
“There are some days I practice positive thinking, and other days I’m not positive I am thinking.” – John M. Eades
“Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.” – Zig Ziglar
“Positive anything is better than negative nothing.” – Elbert Hubbard
“One small positive thought in the morning can change your whole day.”
“An attitude of positive expectation is the mark of the superior personality.” – Brian Tracy
“As you begin changing your thinking, start immediately to change your behavior. Begin to act the part of the person you would like to become. Take action on your behavior. Too many people want to feel, then take action. This never works.” – John Maxwell
“Clear writing demands clear thinking, which makes it the ultimate discipline for sharpening the mind.” – Johnny Uzan
“Consistently successful people have the ability to separate what matters from what doesn’t and see what everyone else is overlooking. This skill is earned by doing the thinking, not buying the thinking.” – Shane Parrish
“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking.” – Leo Tolstoy
“Just think. Just be quiet and think. It’d make all the difference in the world.” – Fred Rogers
“Right thinking comes with self-knowledge. Without understanding yourself, you have no basis for thought.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti
“The challenge of our time is relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.” – Thibaut
“The most powerful form of hard work is thinking clearly.” – James Clear
Deep Thinking Quotes
“Think hard, dig deep, do not take appearances for reality.” – Robert Greene
“There is within every human being a deep well of thinking over which a heavy iron lid is kept clamped.” – Sherwood Anderson
“The more we quiet the mind and free ourselves from clinging to thought forms the better able we are to hear the deeper voice within.” – Ram Dass
“The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium.” – Norbet Platt
“Shallow thinkers watch the news. Deep thinkers read about ideas. Shallow thinkers favor one-sided arguments. Deep thinkers welcome contradictions. Shallow thinkers reach wide audiences with simple aphorisms. Deep thinkers sometimes do too.” – Adam Grant
“Our thinking and our behaviour are always in anticipation of a response. It is therefore fear-based.” – Deepak Chopra
“One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.” – Nikola Tesla
“No matter what the situation, remind yourself ?I have a choice.” – Deepak Chopra
“I think when you multitask so much, you don’t have time to think about anything deeply. You’re giving the world an advantage you shouldn’t do.” – Charlie Munger
“I just want to think deeply about things. Contemplate ideas in a pure, free sort of way. That’s all.” – Haruki Murakami
“I believe deep thinking can only be done in writing. To follow an idea seriously, you must constantly pause to consider all possibilities, which takes time and care.” – François Cholet
“Get into a line that you will find to be a deep personal interest, something you really enjoy spending twelve to fifteen hours a day working at, and the rest of the time thinking about.” – Earl Nightingale
“Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.” – Niels Bohr
“Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“Events in life mean nothing if you do not reflect on them in a deep way, and ideas from books are pointless if they have no application to life as you live it.” – Robert Greene
“Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.” – George Bernard Shaw
“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.” – David Foster Wallace
“My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.” – Jean-Paul Sartre
“The best way to improve your ability to think is to spend time thinking.” – Shane Parrish
“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” – Martin Heidegger
“We waste our time with short term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.” – Naval Ravikant
“What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.” – Voltaire
“Your thinking is no better than the information available in your mind. Garbage in means garbage out. Fill your mind with high quality inputs to improve your thinking.” – Shane Parrish
“The greatest thinkers in history certainly knew the value of shifting the mind into low gear. Charles Darwin described himself as a slow thinker. Einstein was famous for spending ages staring into space in his office at Princeton University.” – Carl Honoré
Funny Thinking Quotes
“Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.” – Albert Einstein
“Few men think, yet all will have opinions. Hence men’s opinions are superficial and confused.” – John Locke
“I really wish I was less of a thinking man and more of a fool not afraid of rejection.” – Billy Joel
“In much of your talking, thinking is half murdered. For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.” – Kahlil Gibran
“Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.” – Blaise Pascal
“Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“Many a serious thinker has been produced in prisons, where we have nothing to do but think.” – Robert Greene
“Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.” – David Herbert Lawrence
“Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well-ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.” – Seneca
“People who say they don’t care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don’t care what people think.” – George Carlin
“Pride is pleasure arising from a man’s thinking too highly of himself.” – Baruch Spinoza
“Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.” – James Thurber
“Some people do not become thinkers simply because their memories are too good.” – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
“The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.” – Horace Walpole
“To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.” – William James
“We are not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think.” – Antonio Damasio
“Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.” – Isaac Asimov
Critical Thinking Quotes
“Think! Think clearly. Think for yourself. Think your own thoughts. Think consciously, actively, critically and with diligent sagacity. Give up the dysfunctional mental habits of believing and judging. Believe nothing; question everything.” – Thibaut
“No skill is more valuable than the ability to critically think through problems. And schools don’t teach you a method of thinking, you have to do the work yourself. Those who do it well get an advantage and those that do it poorly pay.” – George Raveling
“Best training ever for rigor and critical reasoning is…trading. You can only survive long term by going against wrong consensus by experts.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“Don’t just follow people because you agree with what they think. Follow them because you’re intrigued by how they think – and how they make you think.” – Adam Grant
“I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking.” – Albert Einstein
“In today’s society, independent thinking is revolutionary activity where the human mind is bombarded with commercial aspirations.” – Thibaut
“Intelligence is dangerous. Intelligence means you will start thinking on your own; you will start looking around on your own. You will not believe in the scriptures; you will believe only in your own experience.” – Osho
“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.” – Christopher Hitchens
“The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.” – Albert Einstein
“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” – Albert Einstein
“We are addicted to our thoughts. We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking.” – Santosh Kalwar
“We like it when other people agree with us, which is why we rarely say what we are thinking.” – Shane Parrish
“You cannot simply put something new into a place. You have to absorb what you see around you, what exists on the land, and then use that knowledge along with contemporary thinking to interpret what you see.” – Tadao Ando
“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.” – Alan Watts
“Free-thinking people must have the courage to act on their independent thought. Otherwise, they may as well be sheep.” – Ed Latimore
“Free-thinking generates as much admiration as it does animosity.” – Ed Latimore
“I once tried thinking for an entire day, but I found it less valuable than one moment of study.” – Xun Zi
“It is well for people who think, to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean.” – Luther Burbank
“The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” – Albert Einstein
“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.” – Alan Watts
“When you are completely identified with your thinking mind you are totally separate from everything else in the universe.” – Ram Dass
Negative Thinking Quotes
“You need all kinds of influences, including negative ones, to challenge what you believe in.” – Bill Murray
“Try not thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the soft inner part of the peel. The smell. Try and you can’t. The brain doesn’t process negatives.” – Doug Coupland
“If you realized just how powerful your thoughts are, you would never think a negative thought.”
“I’ve never responded well to entrenched negative thinking.” – David Bowie
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are only rearranging their prejudices.” – William James
“A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.” – Oscar Wilde
“Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.” – Arthur Miller
“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
“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.” – Desiderius Erasmus
“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.” – Bruce Lee
“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.” – Carlos Santana
“Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.” – Henry Louis Mencken
“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.” – Mortimer J. Adler
“The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.” – Will Durant
“There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.” – Georg C. Lichtenberg
Thinking Quotes About Life
“You only have control over three things in your life, the thoughts you think, the images you visualize, and the actions you take.” – Jack Canfield
“You cannot tailor-make the situations in life but you can tailor-make the attitudes to fit those situations.” – Zig Ziglar
“You can pass your life in an equable flow of happiness if you can follow the right way and think and act in the right way.” – Marcus Aurelius
“You are educated. Your certification is in your degree. You may think of it as the ticket to the good life. Let me ask you to think of an alternative. Think of it as your ticket to change the world.” – Tom Brokaw
“What you think means more than anything else in your life – more than what you earn, more than where you live, more than your social position, and more than what anyone else may think about you.” – George Matthew Adams
“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.” – Marcus Aurelius
“The secret of living a life of excellence is merely a matter of thinking thoughts of excellence. Really, it’s a matter of programming our minds with the kind of information that will set us free.” – Charles R. Swindoll
“The person who consistently makes you think, is the most undervalued person in your life.” – Shane Parrish
“The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.” – H.L. Mencken
“One great idea had walking down the beach can be worth more than a lifetime of hard work.” – Gary Halbert
“Nothing in life matters quite as much as you think it does while you are thinking about it.” – Daniel Kahneman
“No matter where you go or what you do, you live your entire life within the confines of your head.” – Terry Josephson
“No amount of energy will take the place of thought. A strenuous life with its eyes shut is a kind of wild insanity.” – Henry Van Dyke
“Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.” – Aldous Huxley
“Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.” – William James
“Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“It’s not the events that shape my life that determine how I feel and act, but, rather, it’s the way I interpret and evaluate my life experiences.” – Tony Robbins
“It is by not always thinking of yourself, if you can manage it, that you might somehow be happy. Until you make room in your life for someone as important to you as yourself, you will always be searching and lost.” – Richard Bach
“Intellectualization creates a gap or lack of rapport between you and your life. You may think about things so much that you get into the state where you are eating the menu instead of the dinner.” – Alan Watts
“In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don’t try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.” – Lao Tzu
“If you can dream it, then you can achieve it. You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.” – Zig Ziglar
“I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.” – Harold Kushner
“I have dreamt in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.” – Emily Brontë
“Every thought a person dwells upon, whether he expresses it or not, either damages or improves his life.” – Lucy Mallory
“Building art is a synthesis of life in materialized form. We should try to bring in under the same hat not a splintered way of thinking, but all in harmony together.” – Alvar Aalto
Thinking Quotes About Love
“Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.” – Lao Tzu
“If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.” – Harlan Ellison
“The best and most beautiful things in this world cannot be seen or even heard, but must be felt with the heart.” – Helen Keller
“Love is not a feeling of happiness. Love is a willingness to sacrifice.” – Michael Novak
“Love is not only something you feel, it is something you do.” – David Wilkerson
“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” – Lao Tzu
“Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused.” – Paulo Coelho
“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.” – Victor Hugo
“Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.” – Osho
“Love is a decision, not an emotion or feeling, that if made from the heart will outlast anything.” – Joyce Meyer
“Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.” – Peter Ustinov
“Love is not only something you feel, it is something you give.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
“Love is not about how much you say ‘I love you,’ but how much you can prove that it’s true.”
“Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star.” – E.E. Cummings
“Love is an endless act of forgiveness. Forgiveness is me giving up the right to hurt you for hurting me.” – Beyoncé
“Love is not what the mind thinks, but what the heart feels.” – Greg Evans
“True love stories never have endings.” – Richard Bach
“Love is an adventure, a journey, a process. It requires patience, kindness, and sacrifice.”
“Love is a force more formidable than any other. It is invisible—it cannot be seen or measured, yet it is powerful enough to transform you in a moment, and offer you more joy than any material possession could.” – Barbara De Angelis
“Love is not something you go out and look for. Love finds you, and when it does, ready or not, it’ll be the best thing to ever happen to you.”
“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
“The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.” – Morrie Schwartz
“Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.” – Joan Crawford
“The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds. And that’s what you’ve given me. That’s what I’d hoped to give you forever.” – Nicholas Sparks
“Love is like the wind, you can’t see it but you can feel it.” – Nicholas Sparks
“The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love.” – Henry Miller
Thinking Outside The Box Quotes
“I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.” – Terry Pratchett
“A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“No problem can be solved until it is reduced to some simple form. The changing of a vague difficulty into a specific, concrete form is a very essential element in thinking.” – J. P. Morgan
“Our job is not to make up anybody’s mind, but to open minds and to make the agony of the decision-making so intense you can escape only by thinking.”
“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” – Henry Ford
“The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” – Steve Jobs
“Creativity is intelligence having fun.” – Albert Einstein
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” – Steve Jobs
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – Alan Kay
“If you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done.” – Thomas Jefferson
“If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” – Wayne Gretzky
“In order to change the world, you have to get your head together first.” – Jimi Hendrix
“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” – Albert Einstein
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – Socrates
“If you can dream it, you can do it.” – Walt Disney
“The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” – Mark Zuckerberg
“The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.” – Arthur C. Clarke
“If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.” – Jim Rohn
“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” – Nelson Mandela
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill
“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.” – Milton Berle
“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” – Mahatma Gandhi
Overthinking Quotes
“Overthinking, also, best known as creating problems that are never there” – David Sikhosana
”People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.”
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain
“The more I think about it, the more I realize that overthinking isn’t the real problem. The real problem is that we don’t trust.” – L.J. Vanier
“I think too much, therefore I am not there to live my life.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“To think too much is a disease.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Thinking too much leads to paralysis by analysis. It’s important to think things through, but many use thinking as a means of avoiding action.” – Robert Herjavek
“Overthinking is the biggest cause of unhappiness.”
“Overthinking leads to negative thoughts.”
“If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you’ll die a lot of times.” – Dean Smith
“Overthinking, AKA underacting.” – Jack Butcher
“I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.” – Jonathan Safran Foer
“Don’t get too deep, it leads to over thinking, and over thinking leads to problems that doesn’t even exist in the first place.” – Jayson Engay
“Thinking too much just brings it back to me, me, me—but thanking takes my eyes off myself and my mistakes and puts them on others, on things bigger than myself. I can’t stand here very long without being humbled at how small I am and amazed at how big and beautiful our world is.” – Elizabeth Musser
“My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.” – Sylvia Plath
“Overthinking will destroy your happiness and your mood. It’ll make everything worse than it actually is.”
“Overthinking is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you anywhere.”
“Stop overthinking, you can’t control everything. Just let it be.”
“Overthinking is the art of creating problems that don’t exist.”
“Overthinking leads to paralysis by analysis.”
“The more you overthink, the less you will understand.” – Habeeb Akande
“Overthinking is the thief of time.” – Edward Young
“Overthinking is just a painful reminder that you care too much, even when you shouldn’t.”
“Overthinking is like digging a hole in your mind and jumping in it.”
“Stop overthinking. You’re only creating problems that aren’t there.”
“Overthinking is the enemy of progress.” – Winston Churchill
“Overthinking is a habit that can be broken. It just takes practice.”
“Overthinking is a disease. Let go of your thoughts and just breathe.”
“Overthinking is like a poison. It slowly kills you from the inside.”
Stop Overthinking Quotes
“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” – Steve Jobs
“When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.” – Winston Churchill
“It’s a good idea always to do something relaxing prior to making an important decision in your life.” – Paulo Coelho
“Spend eighty percent of your time focusing on the opportunities of tomorrow rather than the problems of yesterday.” – Brian Tracy
“Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.” – Napoleon Hill
“Do not anticipate trouble or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.” – Benjamin Franklin
“Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
“When you’ve had a life of overthinking, you have the same reaction time and time again. Shyness becomes habitual. When you’re put in an unfamiliar situation, all you want to do is retreat and hide by default. You watch but don’t participate. You listen but don’t respond. You read, but rarely comment. You take a photo, but you rarely post. You write, but you rarely publish. All of this is because your overthinking mind cannot stop thinking about how you will be perceived by the outside world.” – Joel Annesley
“Overthinking is the biggest cause of our unhappiness. Keep yourself occupied. Keep your mind off things that don’t help you.”
“Don’t overthink things. Sometimes you can convince your head not to listen to your heart. Those are the decisions you regret for the rest of your life.”
“Overthinking will not empower you over things that are beyond your control. So, let it be if it is meant to be and move on. Don’t stress yourself out.”
“Worrying doesn’t take away tomorrow’s troubles, it takes away today’s peace.” – Randy Armstrong
“Stop overthinking, you’re only creating problems that aren’t there.”
“Overthinking is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do, but it gets you nowhere.” – Glenn Turner
“The more you overthink the less you will understand.” – Habeeb Akande
“Stop overthinking. You can’t control everything, just let it be.”
“Overthinking is the thief of joy.” – Theodore Roosevelt
“The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.” – Seneca
“Overthinking is the opposite of being present.” – Tony Robbins
“The more you think, the less you know.”
“Overthinking is the art of creating problems that aren’t there.” – David Cain
“Stop thinking too much, it’s alright not to know all the answers.”
In Conclusion
Overall, thinking is a crucial aspect of human cognition, and the ability to think critically, creatively, and analytically is essential for success in many areas of life.
What you think directly influences how you feel and how you behave. Thinking is powerful, whether you’re shaping your moment or your lifetime. Which of these thinking quotes resonated best with you? Do you have any other favorite quotes to add? Feel free to share with us in the comment section below. We would love to hear all about it.