Having a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing seems to me to be one of the most basic principles that you can adopt to contribute to individual and world peace.

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.

Thought takes man out of servitude, into freedom.

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.

It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else's meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions.

To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius - the men of reasoning and the men of imagination.

Philosophy and theology have so much to tell us about God, but people today want to experience God. There is a difference between eating dinner and merely reading the menu.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

History should be written as philosophy.

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

Imagination is the air of mind.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

A philosophy of freedom must set out from the experience of thinking, for it is through this experience of thinking that a human being discovers his own self, finds his bearings as an independent personality.

Our thoughts have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every experience.

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

To me, thoughts are fun and art is fun. The strength of our society should not be idle entertainments but the joy of pursuing ideas.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

The final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition, and of this thought no longer forms a part; but belief is only a stadium of mental action, an effect upon our nature due to thought, which will influence future thinking.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Problems or successes, they all are the results of our own actions. Karma. The philosophy of action is that no one else is the giver of peace or happiness. One's own karma, one's own actions are responsible to come to bring either happiness or success or whatever.

In my solitude I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death.

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.

Champions invariably have fervent philosophical beliefs. Philosophy, in its simplest terms, means 'the love of wisdom.'

Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thought and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society - as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times.

Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.

Many scientists think that philosophy has no place, so for me it's a sad time because the role of reflection, contemplation, meditation, self inquiry, insight, intuition, imagination, creativity, free will, is in a way not given any importance, which is the domain of philosophers.

Philosophy and Art both render the invisible visible by imagination.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.

Words, without power, is mere philosophy.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

My social philosophy may be said to be enshrined in three words: liberty, equality and fraternity. Let no one, however, say that I have borrowed by philosophy from the French Revolution. I have not. My philosophy has roots in religion and not in political science. I have derived them from the teachings of my Master, the Buddha.

Pain makes man think. Thought makes man wise. Wisdom makes life endurable.

The history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the irruption of events in favor of stable structures.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

Our thoughts and imagination are the only real limits to our possibilities.

Thought is more than a right - it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought.

Great thoughts come from the heart.

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.

The energy of the mind is the essence of life.

The process of philosophic and scientific enlightenment has shaken the stability of beliefs held explicitly as articles of faith.

One thought fills immensity.

Without philosophy man cannot know what he makes; without religion he cannot know why.

Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes... and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

Thought is the original source of all wealth, all success, all material gain, all great discoveries and inventions, and of all achievement.

Thought is the wind, knowledge the sail, and mankind the vessel.

All action results from thought, so it is thoughts that matter.

If philosophy is practice, a demand to know the manner in which its history is to be studied is entailed: a theoretical attitude toward it becomes real only in the living appropriation of its contents from the texts.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.

Philosophy is the highest music.