#thinking

Keep your heart clear And transparent, And you will Never be bound. A single disturbed thought Creates ten thousand distractions. ↗

— Ryokan

#honesty #meditation #thinking #thought #honesty

You have to open up to the world and learn optimism...Contentment with the past, happiness with the present, and hope for the future. Learned optimisim. ↗

— Jennifer Crusie

#optimism #positive-thinking #optimism

Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness. ↗

— George Santayana

#freethinking #skepticism #nobility

As I say, I have never in all these years thought of the matter in quite this way; but then it is perhaps in the nature of coming away on a trip such as this that one is prompted towards such surprising new perspectives on topics one imagined one had long ago thought throughly. ↗

— Kazuo Ishiguro

#traveling #understanding #imagination

He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#logic #logical-thinking #common-sense

Some minds, at some point, discover that they can not make sense of their own predications without attention to grammar, although they do not ordinarily think of what they are doing as an exercise in grammar. ↗

— Richard Mitchell

#thinking #grammar

When I get ready to talk to people, I spend two thirds of the time thinking what they want to hear and one third thinking about what I want to say. ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#political-advice #politics #talking #thinking #empathy

My fingers combed through my dark hair, short and straight, landing in choppy, uneven ends nearly level with my chin. The color reminded me of every evil character in any fairytale. It seemed all were characteristically black; black hair, black eyes, black clothing, black demeanors, and black intent. I never thought I was truly a villainous character, not like I knew my father to be, but I was his offspring and devoid of any princess-like characteristics, so that left only the wicked side of the story to play. In my dreams, though, I imagined myself more like Snow White - wavy, raven hair, a perfectly fair complexion, bathed in rose scents, and exhibiting a natural feminine grace that would dance musical circles around both Ginger and Elizabeth. No, I never hoped for such a thing to be real, but I dared to pretend it with perfect clarity in my dreams. ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#black #dandelions #richelle #richelle-goodrich #wishful-thinking

As an improviser I'm now pretty comfortable with trios, so I'm thinking of working up to quartets. ↗

— Fred Frith

#i #improviser #now #pretty #quartets

I was 12 when my parents told me we were moving to Lebanon. I remember thinking, 'Leba-who?' I had absolutely no concept of the place. ↗

— Greg Kinnear

#concept #had #i #i remember #lebanon