"Ten percent of people can think, another..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ten percent of people can think, another ten percent of people think that they think, and eighty percent of people would rather die than be made to think.
More by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.”
“The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves, like ripe fruit, from our experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows whither.”
“The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.”
More on Thinking
“Without execution, thinking is mere idleness.”
“It seems to be the special peculiarity of human beings that they reflect: they think about thinking and know that they know. This, like other feedback systems, may lead to vicious circles and confusions if improperly managed, but self-awareness makes human experience resonant. It imparts that simultaneous "echo" to all that we think and feel as the box of a violin reverberates with the sound of the strings. It gives depth and volume to what would otherwise be shallow and flat.”
“The learned and the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly.”
More on Intellect
“Human intellect is incurably abstract.”
“It is the habit of mediocre minds to condemn all that is beyond their grasp.”
“When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.”