All your actions, whether thinking of God or beating a child, spring from the same source — thinking. The thoughts themselves cannot do any harm. It is when you attempt to use, censor, and control those thoughts to get something that your problems begin. You have no recourse but to use thought to get what you want in this world. But when you seek to get what does not exist — God, bliss, love, etc. — through thought, you only succeed in pitting one thought against another, creating misery for yourself and the world.

For both the rich and the poor, life is dominated by an ever growing current of problems, most of which seem to have no real and lasting solution. Clearly we have not touched the deeper causes of our troubles. It is the main point of this book that the ultimate source of all these problems is in thought itself, the very thing of which our civilization is most proud, and therefore the one thing that is “hidden” because of our failure seriously to engage with its actual working in our own individual lives and in the life of society.

Misery is almost always the result of thinking.

Most of the problems in life are because of two reasons: we act without thinking or we keep thinking without acting.

Thinking aloud is a habit which is responsible for most of mankind's misery.

I believe that thinking about the problem … is your problem.

We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life.

Making Life means making trouble

Short-term thinking is the root of most of our problems, from pollution to debt, both personal and global.

RELIGION: BECAUSE THINKING IS HARD.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts and made up of our thoughts. If a man speak or act with an evil thought, suffering follows him as the wheel follows the hoof of the beast that draws the wagon.... If a man speak or act with a good thought, happiness follows him like a shadow that never leaves him.

Human thinking is born out of this neurological defect in the human species. Anything that is born out of human thinking is destructive. Thought is destructive. Thought is a protective mechanism. It draws frontiers around itself, and it wants to protect itself. It is for the same reason that we also draw lines on this planet and extend them as far as we can.

It's the thinking that gets you killed.

Nothing pains some people more than having to think