Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

I love watching him think," Maeve told Lily. "You can almost hear that poor little hamster running and running on its wheel.

I like the cerebral process.

Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.

Focusing isn't just an optical activity, it is also a mental one.

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

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

Thought means life, since those who do not think so do not live in any high or real sense. Thinking makes the man.

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

If you were to see me as a cheerleader, that would mean I was only watching instead of thinking.

Sometimes, I believe I actually see the wheels in my brain turning.

Thinking isn't something you think about. It comes naturally. Thinking involves many things. It involves being an observer. It involves analyzing things, taking in what's around you in the world and finding how to make it inspire your work or turn it into a lesson to teach your children; it's paying attention to details. That's what thinking is: processing.

... writing letters is thinking, just as talking to you is thinking.

To think is an act. To feel is a fact.

Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.

Tradition, long conditioned thinking, can bring about a fixation, a concept that one readily accepts, perhaps not with a great deal of thought.

Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.

It is remarkable, all that men can swallow. For a good ten minutes I read a newspaper. I allowed the spirit of an irresponsible man who chews and munches another's words in his mouth, and gives them out again undigested, to enter into me through my eyes.

Doubt everything or believe everything: these are two equally convenient strategies. With either we dispense with the need for reflection.

To meditate is to labour; to think is to act. Folded arms work, closed hands perform, a gaze fixed on heaven is a toil.

But men at whiles are sober And think by fits and starts. And if they think, they fasten Their hands upon their hearts

Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.

Thinking is movement confined to the brain

In order to begin an analysis, there must already be a synthesis present in the mind.

Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account; with all its pros and cons, such knowing never gets anywhere, and it knows not why.... The analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, was, in fact, nothing else than ridding it of the form in which it had become familiar.