Best 90 quotes in «free thinking quotes» category

Swimming against the current is the true embodiment of freedom.

Talking reason with a fundamentalist is like talking balanced diet with a hungry tiger - you can't win.

The greatest Church is within you, and it is made of love, courage and conscience.

The fundamental difference between ideology, and its various forms, such as politics, history, religion, ethics, morality, and so on, and science is that the former just offers certain preferences to a person to think and to analyze the reality, but the latter urge a person to abandon all these preferences and neutralize the mind towards reality. Ideology can never be more than subjective valued judgment, but science must be free from this judgment. Ideology is intended for the masses with little, or no rational and analytical thinking, but science for intellectuals for whom rational thinking carries in itself a primary value. The masses can never engage in a genuine science, in similar way, no true intellectual can be an ideologist, because any ideological presupposition would deprive him of his rational and analytical thinking, or reduce it to a considerable extent. Free rational thinking on the base of empirical scientific facts often force you to go against various wide-spread forms of ideology with its all above-mentioned forms.

The destination is fulfilling when the path is authentically your own; find the courage and forge your own path; your essence is at stake

The human has not one but two births – first, when a person is born from the mother’s womb, and second, when that person rises from the socio-culturally imposed cocoon of prejudices and ignorance.

The majority of India's adult and elderly population is too medieval to think as civilized, rational and progressive human beings.

The moment the religious population of the world begins to see the prophets what they really were - mortal teachers of the mortal world, a great portion of the world's religious conflicts shall vanish into thin air.

The moment, you begin to think without any sort of predominant conformity whatsoever, simply to be the act of thinking, that is the moment when answers of real glory and progressive significance begin to manifest in front of your mortal eyes.

There are no greater or truer lords, gods, fathers, sons or holy spirits, than the humans. Humans are the highest beings on earth.

The mind can atrophy, like the muscles, if it is not used.

There is more to life than both cold facts and blind faith.

There's a difference between an open mind and an empty head.

The world needs the kind of education by means of which character is formed, strength of the mind is increased and the human intellect is expanded beyond its own limits.

They can stop me from breathing, but they can’t stop me from thinking and acting, for I am the indomitable humankind.

Think - think deeply - think gently - think humbly.

Think – think without a hurry – think without the veil of labels and words – think without the involvement of the slightest bit of hypocritical self-deception - simply think.

Throw away such intellect that doesn’t bring people together – throw away such scriptures that create walls rather than bridges – throw away such institutions that proclaim exclusive authority over divinity – throw away such reasoning that barres you from accepting human weakness. Throw away every single trace of inhumanity, regardless of their intellectual or non-intellectual grounds. Intellect without humanity, is as dangerous as religious fundamentalism.

To create a new belief is easy but to understand and improve someone's concept and to develop it for good is difficult.

Truth doesn't pay homage to creeds. Creeds must adjust themselves to be compatible with the truth.

Uhyggelige karle, disse videnskabsmænd. Slikt fritænkervæsen!

The sign of wisdom is to have more questions than answers.

Think rationally, feel humanly, act conscientiously and the world will become a real progressive abode of peace.

This is not a book of truth, but simply a book that attempts with as little bias as humanly possible, to understand truth. In reality, there can be no book of truth, because truth does not rise from books. Truth rises from the human mind - truth rises from the deepest fathoms of your soul.

Thus , dear reader, if you have come this far and found your own faith undermined—as I hope—I am willing to say that to some extent I know what you are going through. There are days when I miss my own convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.

Throw away all mystical nonsense and be divine through your acts of kindness - be divine through your gestures of acceptance - be divine through your footsteps of awareness.

To the representatives of theoretical Islam, i.e. Islamic fundamentalists, the Jews, the Christians, the Hindus, the Buddhists and all other humans who are not Muslims, are not just object of extreme detestation, they are, at the worst, lesser humans of false religions. This is not religion my friend. This is primitiveness at its worst.

When your mind is free, you are a thinker. When your heart is free, you are a giver. When your soul is free, you are a lover. When your mind is incarcerated, you are a reveler. When your heart is incarcerated, you are a taker. When your soul is incarcerated, you are an evil doer.

We should all be thinking people.

We the humans are too tiny to know something so grand as an Eternal Driving Force behind the Universe. Ultimately what would really matter in the development of our species as a whole is, we the humans serving humanity.

You do not have a mind belongs to yourself! Your thoughts are the thoughts of your culture! When you speak, it is not you but your culture, your religion, your traditions, your political or spiritual leaders speak! If not you but your culture, your religion etc. are speaking on behalf of you, then what are you, who are you? A stupid puppet? Get a mind which belongs to yourself! Only then you will be able to speak with your own thoughts on behalf of your own self!

Wonders encircled the world.

You never plant trees whose leaves are merely locks when your mind becomes a forbidden paradise of independent thought.

When a person irrationally and quite pathologically sticks to the creeds of his scriptures too much, it can turn even a great human being into the worst version of himself.

All of his (Nanak's) progressive thinking attained absolution at the age of 30, when he had the transcendental experience, quite similar to that of Mohammed and Joan of Arc, that was about to rock the very foundation of orthodox Hinduism in India.

All opinions are not equal, as far as running a people is concerned.

Any scripture that demands irrefutable obedience must be discarded at once.

Any individual whose conscience is pure and clear, who can think for himself or herself, is a musalman or muslim, regardless of socio-religious background. Likewise, any human being who loves the neighbor as much as his or her own family is a Christian.

Alcohol, smoking, God, all these are means for the common human to escape the reality.

A smart person speaks out the truth. A wise person doesn't care about speaking it out, as much as he or she cares about utilizing that truth in the society, in a way that brings most progress, in a way that brings most human development. And that's the purpose atheism should have.

As nature has uncovered from under this hard shell the seed for which she most tenderly cares - the propensity and vocation to free thinking - this gradually works back upon the character of the people, who thereby gradually become capable of managing freedom; finally, it affects the principles of government, which finds it to its advantage to treat men, who are now more than machines, in accordance with their dignity.

Being holistic doesn't mean mumbling mystical mumbo-jumbo all the time, it means seeing the reality as it is, without giving in to either supernatural nonsense or intellectual arrogance.

A thinking human must practice thinking.

Belief is indeed psychologically important for the human mind of general population, but that belief should be nicely compatible with scientific reasoning, otherwise that belief turns into prejudice, which is never beneficial to the human life.

Christ the man died long ago, but Christ the idea of love, still exists, not in any church, rather in the mind of humans.

Beliefs are personal, but universal truths are above that. For example, the surface temperature of the sun is around 5,505 degrees Celsius – the speed of light is around 300,000 kilometers per second – the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old – modern day chimps are the closest cousins of us humans. These are irrefutable universal truth, regardless of what anyone believes.

But what good is the popular opinion, if the lot of us just process like minions?

Dependency on drugs is quite easily proclaimed by the so-called intellectual society as lethal, while that very society has been ever-lastingly dependent upon varied forms of ideologies, be it religious, atheistic, political or any other. They say, “don’t do drugs for it’s dangerous for you”, but they never say, “don’t do ideology for it’s dangerous for your society”.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.

Every smallest step in the field of free thinking, and of the personally formed life, has ever been fought for at the cost of spiritual and physical tortures . . . change has required its innumerable martyrs. . . . Nothing has been bought more dearly than that little bit of human reason and sense of freedom that is now the basis of our pride.