869 – “The value of a liberal arts college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”

–Albert Einstein

855 – Quote about your mind

“You’ve been given a mind of your own. You didn’t have to buy it. You didn’t have to earn it. The most powerful and entertaining tool a thing can possess and you were all given one for free. Don’t give it away for someone else to use. Don’t let someone else buy it from you for peanuts. It’s yours. Use it for yourself. It can literally create anything. It does not have the restrictions you have been taught it has. It can comprehend anything. So have fun, and f**k anyone that tries to take it away from you. Fill it with whatever you want to fill it with… and see what kind of magic you produce.”

–anonymous

Advertisement

631 – “It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.”

–Miles Halter in John Green’s Looking for Alaska

557 -“It isn’t what we say or think that defines us, but what we do.”

–Andrew Davies [Often misattributed to Jane Austen, see Source Notes]

480 – “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” | “How do I know what I think until I see what I say.”

–Flannery O’Connor | –E M Forster [both attributed]

470 – „Der Zweck der Philosophie ist die logische Klärung der Gedanken. Die Philosophie ist keine Lehre, sondern eine Tätigkeit. Ein philosophisches Werk besteht wesentlich aus Erläuterungen. Das Resultat der Philosophie sind nicht „philosophische Sätze“, sondern das Klarwerden von Sätzen. Die Philosophie soll die Gedanken, die sonst, gleichsam, trübe und verschwommen sind, klar machen und scharf abgrenzen.“

“Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in ‘philosophical propositions,’ but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.”

–Ludwig Wittgenstein [See source notes for an alternative translation]

455 – “I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point ‘if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

–Kurt Vonnegut

352 – “One can lead a child to knowledge but one cannot make him think.”

–Lt. Col. Jean V. Dubois (Ret.) in Robert A Heinlein’s Starship Troopers

Alternative:

“You can lead a person to knowledge, but you can’t make them think.”

-anonymous

317 – “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

–Nagasawa in Haruki Murakami novel Norwegian Wood

293 – “The sign of intelligence is that you are constantly wondering. Idiots are always dead sure about every damn thing they are doing in their life.”

–Jaggi Vasudev