Walter Benjamin Quotes

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

Too much of the education system orients students toward becoming better thinkers, but there is almost no focus on our capacity to pay attention and cultivate awareness.

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

I thought a lot and I controlled my thoughts in my work - and I controlled my work through my thoughts.

No amount of energy will take the place of thought. A strenuous life with its eyes shut is a kind of wild insanity.

To do much clear thinking a person must arrange for regular periods of solitude when they can concentrate and indulge the imagination without distraction.

Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.

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.

When you let go of your attention for a little while, do not think you may recover it whenever you please.

Most persons who indulge in second thought don't do much thinking when the subject is presented for first thought.

To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky.

Thinking should be done beforehand and afterwards - never while actually taking a photograph.

Time given to thought is the greatest time saver of all.

Think. That's what we need you to do. Think.

The level of achievement that we have at anything, is a reflection, of how well, we were able to focus on it. Because the only thing that's holding you back, is the way you're thinking.

Think about these once in awhile, and watch your answers change.

Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.

You don't hurry a thinker, and you don't talk to him when he's thinking. It's just inconsiderate.

I love to dream, but I never try to dream and think at the same time.

Perhaps it is even more important to know what one should not think about than what one should think about.

The mind is constantly involved in thinking, in judging, in evaluating. Its whole function seems to be to keep you involved in thoughts, which are nothing but soap bubbles - or perhaps soap bubbles have more substance to them than your thoughts.

Writing at least is a silent meditation even though you’re going a hundred miles an hour.

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

The man who doesn’t make up his mind to cultivate the habit of thinking misses the greatest pleasure in life.

Thinking nurseth thinking.