This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"In private conversation between intimate friends, the wisest men very often talk like the weakest; for indeed the talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud." - Joseph Addison
"Infants instinctively resist enculturation because they intuitively sense in it a denial of life that robs us of our spirit and our loving, willing, thinking, being. Resistance is futile. Without exception, these cultural techniques involve carefully masked threats that prey upon the child’s rapidly learned fear of pain, harm, or deprivation, and more primal anxiety over separation or alienation from parent, caregiver, or society. “Do this or you will suffer the consequences.” This threat, in fact, underlies every facet of our life from our first potty training through university exams." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"Doubting everything or believing everything are two equally convenient solutions, both of which save us from thinking." - Henri Poincaré, fully Jules Henri Poincaré
"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
"Art should be a satire and a warning against our paralyzed emotions, our devitalized thinking and our denaturalized living. It teaches us unsophistication in a sophisticated world. It should restore to us health and sanity caused by too much mental activity. It should sharpen our senses, re-establish the connection between our reason and our human nature, and assemble the ruined parts of a dislocated life again into a whole, by restoring our original nature." - Lin Yutang
"The curse of bigness has prevented proper thinking." - Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
"When we cling, often forever, to our old patterns of thinking and behaving, we fall to negotiate any crisis, to truly grow up, and to experience the joyful sense of rebirth that accompanies the successful transition into greater maturity." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"One of the commonest mistakes and one of the costliest thinking that success is due to some genius, some magic - something or other which we do not possess. Success is generally due to holding one, and failure to letting go. You decide to learn a language, study music, take a course of reading, train yourself physically. Will it be success or failure? It depends upon how much pluck and perseverance that word “decide” contains. The decision that nothing can overrule, the grip that nothing can detach will bring success." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"Man was born for two things - thinking and acting." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"Whatever and however we may try to think, we think within the sphere of tradition. Tradition prevails when it frees us from thinking back to a thinking forward, which is no longer a planning. Only when we turn thoughtfully toward what has already been thought, will we be turned to use for what must still be thought." - Martin Heidegger
"Thinking should catch sight of what can be heard. Thinking is a fair hearing that catches a glimpse." - Martin Heidegger
"You don’t have to think about doing the right thing. If you’re for the right thing, then you do it without thinking." - Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
"When our senses of sight and hearing are distracted by the things outside, without the participation of thought, then the material things act upon the material senses and lead them astray. That is the explanation. The function of the mind is thinking: when you think, you keep your mind, and when you don’t think, you lose your mind. This is what heaven has given to us. One who cultivates his higher self will find that his lower self follows in accord. That is how a man becomes a great man." - Mencius, born Meng Ke or Ko NULL
"Great thinkers have always been motivated by the enjoyment of thinking rather than by the material rewards that could be gained by it." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"History is taught with little regard to the ecology, the economics, the sociology or psychology - let alone the biology - that are necessary to understand human action. The same is true of all other academic subjects. Yet if we continue to teach physics separately from ethics, or molecular biology without concern for empathy, the chances of a monstrous evolutionary miscarriage are going to increase. To avoid these possibilities, it is imperative to begin thinking about a truly integrative, global education that takes seriously the actual interconnectedness of causes and effects." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"Truth itself is immutable, even if we as humans in our thinking do not possess the truth immutably." - Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler
"What you are thinking about, you are becoming." - Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr.
"Sharpen your thinking about goal setting. Be realistic about the amount of time and effort that might be necessary. Make a commitment to excellence. Learn to distinguish between a goal and a wish. Prepare for ultimate goals by achieving your interim goals. Choose goals that will benefit others as well as yourself." - Norman Vincent Peale
"How do you build confidence in yourself? Take your mind off the things that seem to be against you. Thinking about negative factors simply builds them up into a power they need not have." - Norman Vincent Peale
"There is a basic law that like attracts like. That which you mentally project reproduces in kind and negative thoughts definitely attract negative results. Conversely, if a person habitually thinks optimistically and hopefully he activates life around him positively and thereby attracts to himself positive results. His positive thinking sets in motion creative forces, and success instead of eluding him flows toward him." - Norman Vincent Peale
"A person who reads and studies and converses on current events in science, philosophy, political will, in the process, escape from the dull self-centeredness, and his participatory awareness of life in its infinite vitality will tend to produce the excitement which is inherent in happiness. Unfortunately, thinking the interesting thoughts which create happiness is a disciplinary process which too few people employ." - Norman Vincent Peale
"Fear can infect us early in life until eventually it cuts a deep groove of apprehension in all our thinking. To counteract it, let faith, hope and courage enter your thinking. Fear is strong, but faith is stronger yet." - Norman Vincent Peale
"There is a magnet in your heart that will attract true friends. That magnet is unselfishness, thinking of others first...when you learn to live for others, they will live for you." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"We cannot leave behind us the sins of our past. We must not forget that nothing disappears. Everything is eternal. Everything that has been is still in existence. The whole history of humanity is the “history of crime”... Man must go back, seek for, and destroy the causes of evil however far back they lie. It is only in this idea that the hint of the possibilities of a general evolution can be found. It is only in this idea that the possibility of changing the karma of humanity lies, because changing the karma means changing the past... There will be no possibility of thinking of evolution of humanity, if the possibility did not exist for individually evolving man to go into the past and struggle against the causes of the present evil which lie there." - P.D. Ouspensky, fully Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, also Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, also Uspenskii or Uspensky
"Thinking is the talking of the soul [the mind] with itself." - Plato NULL
"The cause of all the blunders committed by man arises from this excessive self-love. For the lover is blinded by the object loved; so that he passes a wrong judgment on what is just, good and beautiful, thinking that he ought always to honor what belongs to himself in preference to truth. For he who intends to be a great man ought to love, neither himself nor his own thins, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by himself, or by another." - Plato NULL
"Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as strong to think... Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"God enters by a private door into every individual. Long prior to reflection is the thinking of the mind." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"What is life but the angle of vision? What is life but what a [person] is thinking of all day? By how much we know, so much we are." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function, living is the functionary." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Life consists in what man is thinking of all day." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Courage charms us because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Consciousness, which is the principle of liberty, is not the principle of art. We listen badly to a symphony when we know we are listening. We think badly when we know we are thinking. Consciousness of thinking is not thought." - Remy de Gourmont
"Thinking is hard work. One can't bear burdens and ideas at the same time." - Remy de Gourmont
"Examining attentively that which I was, I saw that I could conceive that I had no body, and that there was no world nor place where I might be; but yet that I could not for all that conceive that I was not. On the contrary, I saw from the very fact that I thought of doubting the truth of other things, it very evidently and certainly followed that I was; on the other hand if I had only ceased from thinking, even if all the rest of what I had ever imagined had really existed, I should have no reason for thinking that I had existed. From that I knew that I was a substance the whole essence or nature of which is to think, and that for its existence there is no need of any place, nor does it depend on any material thing; so that this ‘me,’ that is to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from body, and is even more easy to know than is the latter; and even if body were not, the soul would not cease to be what it is." - René Descartes
"Reading good books is like having a conversation with the highly worthy persons of the past who wrote them; indeed, it is like having a prepared conversation in which those persons disclose to us only their best thinking." - René Descartes
"What is man? Shall I say a rational animal?… a thinking being, that is to say, a mind, an understanding, or a reasonable being… A thing which thinks." - René Descartes
"American cultural traditions define personality, achievement, and the purpose of human life in ways that leave the individual suspended in glorious, but terrifying, isolation. These are limitations of our culture, of the categories and ways of thinking we have inherited, not limitations of individuals... who inhabit this culture." - Robert Bellah, fully Robert Neelly Bellah
"Death is a cessation of motion, also a cessation of time - than it has to do with life, its most complex embodiment. Thinking that time brings death is a less workable assumption than a moral evasion, an example of our chronic tendency to ascribe our woes and weaknesses to external circumstance rather than to living will." - Robert Grudin
"No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking." - Ruth Benedict, born Ruth Fulton
"He who prays fervently knows not whether he prays or not, for he is not thinking of prayer which he makes, but of God, to whom he makes it." - Saint Francis de Sales NULL
"Thinking nurseth thinking." - Philip Sidney, fully Sir Philip Sidney
"Whom do I call educated? First, those who manage well the circumstances they encounter day by day. Next, those who are decent and honorable in their intercourse with all men, bearing easily and good naturedly what is offensive in others and being as agreeable and reasonable to their associates as is humanly possible to be... those who hold their pleasures always under control and are not ultimately overcome by their misfortunes... those who are not spoiled by their successes, who do not desert their true selves but hold their ground steadfastly as wise and sober -- minded men." - Socrates NULL
"Those who do not live in the single Way fail in both activity and in passivity, assertion and denial. To deny the reality of things is to miss their reality; to assert the emptiness of things is to miss their reality. The more you talk and think about it, the further astray you wander from the truth. Stop talking and thinking and there is nothing you will not be able to know. To return to the root is to find the meaning, but to pursue appearances is to miss the source. At the moment of inner enlightenment, there is a going beyond appearance and emptiness. The changes that appear to occur in the empty world we call real only because of our ignorance. Do not search for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions." - Sosan Zenji, aka Chien-chih Seng-Tsan or Ch'an Seng-ts'an
"When no discriminating thoughts arise, the old mind ceases to exist. When thought objects vanish, the thinking-subject vanishes, as when the mind vanishes, objects vanish. Things are objects because there is a subject or mind; and the mind is a subject because there are objects. Understand the relativity of these two and the basic reality; the unity of emptiness. In this Emptiness the two are indistinguishable and each contains in itself the whole world. If you do not discriminate between coarse and fine you will not be tempted to prejudice and opinion." - Sosan Zenji, aka Chien-chih Seng-Tsan or Ch'an Seng-ts'an
"The unlearned lose the power of clear thinking as they grow old, but scholars gain in it as their years advance." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL