Original Thought Quotes

I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it's like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

We may divide thinkers into those who think for themselves and those who think through others. The latter are the rule and the former the exception. The first are original thinkers in a double sense, and egotists in the noblest meaning of the word.

Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.

Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.

The great creators - the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors - stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible... But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.

People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.

I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.

The world's greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for that a professional chair offers no special opportunities.

… the third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority, the second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority, and the first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of one's neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him.

Creativity has a lot to do with the main idea. Inspiration is what comes when you are dealing with the idea. But inspiration won't invite what's not there to begin with.

Living truth is that alone which has its origins in thinking. Just as a tree bears year after year the same fruit which is each year new, so must all permanently valuable ideas be continually born again in thought.

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them.

Though I may not . . . be able to quote other authors, I shall rely on that which is much greater and more worthy - on experience.

I think people are looking for an alternative because in addition to there being sort of a myopic, lemming - like ants on a sugar cube mentality on this DNS attack story by many in the media, there's just this culture of sameness. Everybody sounds the same.

Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.

Uncommon things must be said in common words, if you would have them to be received in less than a century.

Sankhachil' did not have a script, to begin with. It was just a thought.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote