Thinking Quotes - Page 326

Pride is a mental factor causing us to feel higher or superior to others. Even our study of dharma can be the occasion for the delusion of pride to arise if we think our understanding is superior to that of everyone else. Pride is harmful because it prevents us from accepting fresh knowledge from a qualified teacher. Just as a pool of water cannot collect on the tip of a mountain, so too a reservoir of understanding cannot be established in a mind falsely elevated by pride.

I think of myself as Special Forces, clearing the path for the infantry.

I think the British people have a strong sense of what is fair.

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I used to be ashamed by the way that I grew up. I tried to lie my way through better times, but when you think that honesty and truth is really your best weapon you embrace it and put it behind you. In the end, it drives you and motivates you to do good work. No one should be ashamed about where they come from as long as you desire to be a compassionate and decent person.

A romantic, I think, picks the rose and is careless with the thorn.

For me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects.

When the woman is attractive, is it an interesting picture, or is it the woman? I had a lot of headaches with that, which was why it was interesting. I don't think I always got it straight.

We have nearly complete misunderstanding between people of different faiths in Lake Wobegon, and that's probably one reason why we get along so very well. It's when you are trying to convince another person to think the same way that you do that there is friction and trouble between people. But when you feel that the other person is dumber than dirt, too dumb for words - why waste your breath - you get along pretty well. There's no bond between people that's quite so strong as when people each feel slightly superior towards the other one.

I almost never set out to photograph a landscape, nor do I think of my camera as a means of recording a mountain or an animal unless I absolutely need a 'record shot'. My first thought is always of light.

Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?

I think that if a person doesn't feel cynical then they're out of phase with the 20th century. Being cynical is the only way to deal with modern civilization - you can't just swallow it whole.

Every single person has at least one secret that would break your heart. If we could just remember this, I think there would be a lot more compassion and tolerance in the world.

Smile your best smile at everyone you see. Think about all the things you have to be thankful for... and smile. The world will smile with you.

People usually think according to their inclinations, speak according to their learning and ingrained opinions, but generally act according to custom.

A fanatic is a man that does what he thinks the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the case.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wilderness. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. After all, the lone trail is bestI'll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.

I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was.

Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste.

I can never think of the time I spend idling in railway stations as lost; it's a waiting liberated from the three temporal vices of regret, anticipation or boredom, the weak echo of that bliss spent between lifetimes.

Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20

Whatever you do, think of next morning's headlines.

The president is the country's scapegoat more than the country's leader; the president has as much power as we think the president has. Whoever has the most money is the puppet master.

I think we give human beings too much credit. We're primates, you know.