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Limitations of Human Thought
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Thought cannot do.
Thought cannot know.
Thought cannot create.
Thought cannot understand.
Thought cannot be anything but thought.
All great performers report the absence of thought during their best performances whether those performances are in theater, music, sports, or any one of the arts.
Thought cannot be what it points to. Thought can point to experience. Thought can point to sensation. Thought can point to memory. Thought can point to thought. Thought can point to feeling. Thought can point to reality.
Confusion occurs when you try to understand two disparate thoughts with another thought. Why? Because thought cannot understand.
Understanding is difficult when you try to understand with thought. Why? Because thought cannot understand.
Thought is not talent.
Thought is not reality.
Thought is not action.
Thought is not wisdom.
Thought is not experience.
Thought is not what it is about.
Illusion is thought as reality.
Why?
Thought can only be about reality.
Creativity happens without thought.
Talent happens without thought.
Skill happens without thought.
Joy happens without thought.
Stuckness always involves thought.
Why?
Because thought pointing to thought as reality prevents the natural flow or passing of thought.
The intelligent use of thought is to drop and forget thought once you see or go where thought is pointing--as its job is then done.
Thought is an alert.
Thought is a pointer.
Thought is a beacon.
Thought is a signpost.
Thought is a flashlight.
Thought is a ladder to something else.
Thought is a steppingstone to something else.
Thought is a magnificent tool to focus attention.
Thought is no more or less than that: a flashlight.
Even mathematical systems cannot prove themselves.
Proof comes from outside a system as thought cannot create or understand anything. (Kurt Gödel)
Thinking is regularly distorted in order to meet the goals of ego.
See Freud's Ego Defense Mechanisms
The cognitive psychotherapies expose common distortions in human thinking, for example, see: 7 Thinking Errors of CT
QUOTATIONS VARIOUS SOURCES
"You cannot think and hit at the same time."--Yogi Berra
"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."--Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860
"You never exist quite so much as when you are not thinking."--Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900, German philosopher
"Knowledge can be communicated but not wisdom."--Herman Hesse, 1877-1962
"Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."--Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900
"We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it."--William Hazlitt, 1778-1830
"To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything, or nothing, about it."--Olin Miller
"We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand."--Eric Hoffer
"Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises, but in the nature and parts of premises."--Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it."--Igor Stravinsky
"I'll play it first and tell you what it is later."--Miles Davis
"When words leave off, music begins."--Heinrich Heine
"Nothing reaches the intellect before making its appearance in the senses."--Latin proverb
"It's [music composition] the most effortless thing in the world because you don't do anything. I hate to say it like that, but it's the truth."--Michael Jackson
"A man doesn't know what he knows until he knows what he doesn't know."--Laurence Peter
"A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things."--Eleanor Roosevelt
"Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little."--Agnes de Mille
"The great man is he who does not lose his child-heart."--Mencius
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."--Confucius
"You cannot plough a field by turning it over in your mind."--Anonymous
"Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain."--Carl G. Jung
"Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?"--A. L. Milne (Winnie the Pooh)
"Energy will do anything that can be done in this world."--Johann Wolfgang van Goethe
"If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."--Anatole France
"I'm not sure I want popular opinion on my side--I've noticed those with the most opinions often have the fewest facts."--Bethania McKenstry
"The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time."--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Education is learning what you didn't know you didn't know."--George Boas
"The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it."--Daniel Webster
"What we see depends mainly on what we look for."--John Lubbock
"Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered have prevented a single foolish action."--Thomas B. Macaulay
"There are no rules. Just follow your heart."--Robin Williams
"The intellect is not the means of creation, and creation does not take place through the functioning of the intellect; on the contrary, there is creation when the intellect is silent."--J. Krishnamurti, The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, Volume V, page 97
"Surely love has nothing to do with the mind, it is not the product of the mind; love is entirely independent of calculation, of thought."--J. Krishnamurti, The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, Volume V, page 99
"If I do not understand myself, the whole complexity of myself, I have no basis for thinking."--J. Krishnamurti, The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, Volume V, page 334
"Belief creates its own experience; therefore, such an experience is not true."--J. Krishnamurti, The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, Volume V, page 334
"To seek truth is to deny truth because truth cannot be sought after--it must come to you."--J. Krishnamurti, The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, Volume V, page 338
"And believing can only condition experience. Surely, what I believe, that I experience."--J. Krishnamurti, The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, Volume V, page 346
"There is no tranquility in ideas."--J. Krishnamurti, The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, Volume V, page 347
"Without understanding the process of the self, there is no bais for thought, there is no basis for right thinking."--J. Krishnamurti, The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, Volume V, page 351
"I do not know if you have ever noticed that the more you struggle to understand, the less you understand any problem. But, the moment you cease to struggle and let the problem tell you the whole story, give all its significance--then there is understanding, which means, obviously, that to understand, the mind must be quiet."--J. Krishnamurti, The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, Volume V, page 358
"After all, without understanding yourself, what basis have you for right thinking?"--J. Krishnamurti, The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, Volume V, page 361
"That is, when the mind ceases to create, then there is creation."--J. Krishnamurti, The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, Volume V, page 362
"All success comes from a combination of implementation and knowledge. Knowledge alone is meaningless without action."--Brian Koslow
"Scientist is the term given to the kind of fool who tries to prove matter over mind."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"Knowledge does not do."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"Knowledge does not get it."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"Knowledge is not it."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"Facts can't figure."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"Facts can't feel."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"Facts can't fix."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"Knowledge has no intelligence."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."--Mark Twain
"Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life."--Simone Weil
"Most thinking problems come from crossing, mixing, or trying to make two signals into one."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"Most thinking problems come from crossing, mixing, or trying to be on two channels at the same time."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."--Albert Einstein (reported to have been a sign in his office)
"The worst extreme view is the extreme view that extremes never exist."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"If you think too long, you think wrong."--Jim Kaat
"We don't see things as they are; we see them as we are."--Anais Nin
"To think quit thinking."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"To do quit thinking."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"To be quit thinking."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"Behold, all ye that kindle a fire, that compass yourselves about with sparks: walk in the light of your fire, and in the sparks that ye have kindled. This shall ye have of mine hand; ye shall lie down in sorrow."--Isaiah 50:11
"Thinking can't think."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"Thinking can't do."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"Thinking can't be."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"Thinking can't."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"LORD, thou wilt ordain peace for us: for thou also hast wrought all our works in us."--Isaiah 26:12
"The guts carry the feet, not the feet the guts."--Miguel de Cervantes
"Do not mistake the signpost for the destination."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"To think too long about doing a thing often becomes its undoing."--Eva Young
"If you want something really important to be done you must not merely satisfy the reason, you must move the heart also."--Mahatma Gandhi
"A man must be obedient to the promptings of his innermost heart."--Robertson Davies
"Descriptions of food never satisfy the hungry."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."--Mark Twain
"What you don't see with your eyes, don't witness with your mouth."--Jewish proverb
"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool."--William Shakespeare, 1546-1616
"The conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones."--Søren Kierkegaard, early 19th-century Danish philosopher
"The more time you have to think things through, the more you have to screw it up."--Clint Eastwood
"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves."--Carl Jung
"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of."--Blaise Pascal
"Some blundering with what I set before you, try in vain with empty talk to separate the essences of things and say how each thing truly is."--Hearaclitus, Fragments
"Though tightly the net of words forms, how surely truth slips out."--Lao Tzu
"The foolish reject what they see; the wise reject what they think."--Taoist saying
"The wise man lives by what he cannot see."--Taoist saying
"Return to the root and you will find the meaning."--Taoist saying
"The unexpected is bound to happen; the anticipated never comes."--Buddhist saying
"Stop talking, stop thinking, and there is nothing you will not understand."--Buddhist saying
"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."--Ludwig Wittgenstein
"The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon."--Zen saying
"Talk is cheap."--Aphorism
"The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests."--A.J. Nock
"Well done is better than well said."--Benjamin Franklin
"When you ask for help building your house, do you want words or deeds?"--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"Taking about it is not the same as doing it."--Aphorism
"In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped."--Lao Tzu
"He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know."--Lao Tzu
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."--Leonardo DaVinc
"Don't just talk the talk--walk the walk."--Aphorism
"The proof is in the pudding not the recipe."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"The recipe is not the cooking."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"Talking about it doesn't get it done."--Aphorism
"Music is the inarticulate speech of the heart, which cannot be compressed into words, because it is infinite."--Richard Wagner
"Who ranks as the highest? One who has no desire at all, not even for enlightenment. One who has no attachments. One who is free from doubt. One who has gone beyond that which you can understand."--The Dhammapada: The Highest, verses 410-411
"The correct way of living is not found simply by discussing the theory of it. Even without study you can experience it, but you have to live it."--The Dhammapada: A Proper Life, verse 259
"What is the hardest task in the world? To think."--Emerson
"There are no facts only interpretations."--Friedrich Nietzsche
"What we call truths are just those errors that we cannot give up."--Friedrich Nietzsche
"The expressed is not the experienced."--Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
"The truth of Zen is the truth of life, and life means to live, to move, to act, not merely to reflect."--Daisetz T. Suzuk
"It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it."--Eleanor Roosevelt
QUOTATIONS SCRIPTURE
"There is no wisdom nor understanding nor counsel against the LORD."--Proverbs 21:30
"Without eyes thou shalt want light: profess not the knowledge therefore that thou hast not."--Ecclesiasticus 3:25
"But the love of the Lord passeth all things for illumination: he that holdeth it, whereto shall he be likened?"--Ecclesiasticus 25:11
"Woe unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the LORD, and their works are in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us?"--Isaiah 29:15
"For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts."--Isaiah 55:9
"To God only wise, be glory through Jesus Christ for ever. Amen."--Romans 16:27
"For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?"--I Corinthians 1:19-20
"But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned."--I Corinthians 2:14
"And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God."--Ephesians 3:19
"And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."--Philippians 4:7
"O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called:"--I Timothy 6:20
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