All Thoughtful Quotations

It is good to rub and polish our brains against that of others.
Michel de Montaigne

We think too small. Like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view.
Mao Tse-Tung

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
Walter Lipman

Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried.
William Shakespeare

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
William Shakespeare

Men give me some credit for genius. All the genius I have lies in this: When I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. I explore it in all its bearings. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort which I make is what the people call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.
Alexander Hamiltonr

The aim of education should be to teach us how to think, rather than what to think.
James Beattie

What gems of painting or statuary are in the world of art, or what flowers are in the world of nature, are gems of thought to the cultivated and the thinking.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

We bring forth weeds when our quick minds lie still.
William Shakespeare

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

The less men think, the more they talk.
Baron Montesquieu

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.
Confucius

The universe is change;
our life is what our thoughts make it.
Marcus Aurelius

But words are things, and a small drop of ink
Falling like dew upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
Sir Aubrey De Vere

Thoughts rule the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thinking is the talking of the soul with itself.
Plato

Impromptu thoughts are mental wild-flowers.
Mme. du Deffand

Your disposition will be suitable to that which you most frequently think on; for the soul is, as it were, tinged with the color and complexion of its own thoughts.
Marcus Antonius

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probably reason why so few people engage in it.
Henry Ford

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what other people think.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The efficient man is the man who thinks for himself, and is capable of thinking hard and long.
Charles W. Eliot

They are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts.
Sir Philip Sidney

Change your thoughts and you change your world.
Norman Vincent Peale

Obvious thinking commonly leads to wrong judgments and wrong conclusions.
Humphrey B. Neil

Language is the close-fitting dress of thought.
R. C. Trench