Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.
Thinking is the most overrated human activity.
When men comfort themselves with philosophy, 'tis not because they have got two or three sentences, but because they have digested those sentences, and made them their own: philosophy is nothing but discretion.
How can anyone become a thinker unless he spends at least a third of every day away from passions, people, and books?
If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all?.
There never was a man of solid understanding, whose apprehensions are sober, and by a pensive inspection advised, but that he hath found by an irresistible necessity one true God and everlasting being.
Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think.
No amount of energy will take the place of thought. A strenuous life with its eyes shut is a kind of wild insanity.
Thought is the work of the intellect, reverie is its self-indulgence. To substitute day-dreaming for thought is to confuse a poison with a source of nourishment.
Crime, folly, sickness and all phenomena must be contemplated with complete freedom from fear aversion or shame. Otherwise we shall fail to see accurately, and interpret intelligently; in which case we shall be unable to outwit and outfight them.
Before man can be free, and equal, and truly wise, he must cast aside the chains of habit and superstition; he must strip sensuality of its pomp, and selfishness of its excuses, and contemplate actions and objects as they really are.
What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it.
Such a man, truly wise, creams off Nature leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up.
