Sarah Josepha Hale Quotes

Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.

I think it's good to stimulate your mind.

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

I'd have liked to have been a bit more intellectual. I'd have liked to have had more brains.

I think I was just constantly seeking mental stimulation from anything I could get.

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well.

Keep up the fires of thought, and all will go well.

Active minds that think and study, like swift brooks are seldom muddy.

Thinking. This book contains some. Whether you try it at home is up to you.

A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.

Am I an intellectual? I don't think so. Less than people sometimes think, I have to say. But more than some others think.

The thinking that guides your intelligence is much more important than how much intelligence you may have.

I don't think people are averse to thinking about things in a deep way, but we have limited time and opportunity to think about things in a deep way. I think that's why there is an appetite for non-fiction - it gives people the opportunity to reexamine ordinary experience and be smarter about it.

Do you have a brain? Then you can think your way out of it. The reason we have brains is so we can figure out how to do things.

A high standard of living is usually accompanied by a low standard of thinking.

It really don't matter what you're thinking about, as long as you're thinking about something.

To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one's ability to know; it enfeebles one's ability to feel and think.

I wouldn't say I was a born writer; I'm a born thinker.

What is a demanding pleasure that demands the use of ones mind! Not in the sense of problem solving, but in the sense of exercising discrimination, judgment, awareness.

Reading not only enlarges and challenges the mind; it also engages and exercises the brain. Today's youth who sits mesmerized by a television screen is not going to be tomorrow's leader. Television watching is passive. Reading is active.

My goal in life is to make people think. If I do that, I've been a success.

You could reason with someone who was halfway educated and appeal to his intelligence, but I felt helpless in the face of utter stupidity.

The class of those who have the ability to think their own thoughts is separated by an unbridgeable gulf from the class of those who cannot.

Logic is the art of thinking well: the mind, like the body, requires to be trained before it can use its powers in the most advantageous way.

I stop paying attention because as much as I love beauty, I hate stupidity, and seeing the two combined pisses me off.