The purpose of thinking is so our thoughts die instead of us.

Thoughts should serve a useful purpose. If they don’t, they’re useless. That’s straight thinking.

Learning without thinking is useless. Thinking without learning is dangerous.

Until thought is linked with purpose there is no intelligent accomplishment.

Thoughts should serve a useful purpose. If they don’t, they’re useless.

On the left: A mush of useless thoughts: Worry, stress, suffering, confusion, not knowing what to do. On the right: ONE straight thought that has a (single) useful purpose. I wanted to start using my mind as a tool.

Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood — all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.

Thinking is good, but excessive thinking is not. Between thoughts if there is a period of thoughtlessness, thoughts will be fresh and pathbreaking. A thinker will be able to cultivate a strain of healthy thoughts only when he pays attention to thoughtlessness also.

[W]hy presumes purpose... But what if there isn't purpose? Whenever we say why we really mean how.

Learning without thinking is wasted effort; thinking without learning is dangerous

If you want to have useful thoughts, here’s a rule of thumb: Only think about things you can control. That automatically eliminates about 99% of your thoughts because there’s very little you control in life.

[N]o study is likely to be fruitful of results if carried on without a system. The majority of those who pursue knowledge for its own sake pursue it after an aimless and desultory fashion.

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.

But the idea of a purposeless world is horrifying because it is incomplete. Purpose is a pre-eminently human attribute. To say that the world has no purpose is to say that it is not human[.] For what is not human appears to be inhuman only when man sets himself over against nature, for then the inhumanity of nature seems to deny man, and its purposelessness to deny his purposes. But to say that nature is not human and has no purpose is not to say what it has instead. The human body as a whole is not a hand, but it does not for this reason deny the hand.