Sermon quotes on thought

Jerry Bridges

God’s Word must be so strongly fixed in our minds that it becomes the dominant influence in our thoughts, our attitudes, and our actions. One of the most effective ways of influencing our minds is through memorizing Scripture. David said, “I have hidden Your Word in my heart that I might not sin against You” (Psm. 119:11).

G.K. Chesterton

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

Jonathan Ive

At the start of the process the idea is just a thought – very fragile and exclusive. When the first physical manifestation is created everything changes. It is no longer exclusive, now it involves a lot of people.

 

William James

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

 

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man. But they don’t bite everybody.

 

Soren Kierkegaard

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

 

Abraham Lincoln

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.

 

Haruki Murakami

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

Norwegian Wood

John Henry Newman

It is often said that second thoughts are best. So they are in matters of judgment but not in matters of conscience.

J.I. Packer

Our business is to present the Christian faith clothed in modern terms, not to propagate modern thought clothed in Christian terms… Confusion here is fatal.

Blaise Pascal

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.

 Dorothy L. Sayers

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

 

Lysa TerKeurst

When we have the same thought again, the line of the original thought is deepened, causing what’s called a memory trace. With each repetition the trace goes deeper and deeper, forming and embedding a pattern of thought. When an emotion is tied to this thought pattern, the memory trace grows exponentially stronger.

 

Rick Warren

The way you think determines the way you feel, and the way you feel determines the way you act.

William James

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

G.K. Chesterton

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

A Short History of England (New York: John Lane Company, 1917)

James Bryce

To most people nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking.

Studies in History and Jurisprudence, Obedience,1901.

Alfred North Whitehead

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

Modes of Thought

William James

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

G.K. Chesterton

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

A Short History of England (New York: John Lane Company, 1917)

Source Unknown

We sow a thought and reap an act; We sow an act and reap a habit; We sow a habit and reap a character; We sow a character and reap a destiny.  

Jennie Allen

I began to see a pattern at work in many of us. Our emotions were leading us to thoughts, and those thoughts were dictating our decisions, and our decisions were determining behaviors, and then the behaviors were shaping our relationships, all of which would take us back to either healthy or unhealthy thoughts.

Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Spiral of Toxic Thoughts, WaterBrook, 2020.

Jennie Allen

The average person has more than thirty thousand thoughts per day. Of those, so many are negative that “according to researchers, the vast majority of the illnesses that plague us today are a direct result of a toxic thought life.”

Jennie Allen, Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Spiral of Toxic Thoughts, WaterBrook, 2020.

Lauren F. Winner

The desert saints said that the beginning of renouncing a thought is simply noticing it. That is part of what I’m doing in my quarter hours—I am noticing, and naming, and then, for a few minutes, quarantining a distraction. But the desert fathers say something more: after noticing a thought, replace it with prayer.

Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, HarperOne, 2012.

Knox McCoy

Too often we give real estate to things in our lives that either haven’t earned their land or were never meant to occupy important space in the first place.

All Things Reconsidered: How Rethinking What We Know Helps Us Know What We Believe, Thomas Nelson, 2020.

James Allen

You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.

Above Life’s Turmoil (London: L. N. Fowler, 1910), 82.

Parker J. Palmer

There is no way out of one’s inner life, so one had better get into it. On the inward and downward spiritual journey, the only way out is through.

Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 85.

Dr. Caroline Leaf

Mind-management is a skill that needs to be learned and constantly upgraded as we grow from childhood into adulthood. For every new experience we need a new set of mind-management tools.

Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: 5 Simple, Scientifically Proven Steps to Reduce Anxiety, Stress, and Toxic Thinking, Baker Publishing Group, 2021.

Craig Groeschel

Our lives are always moving in the direction of our strongest thoughts. What we think shapes who we are.

Winning the War in Your Mind, Zondervan, 2021.

Craig Groeschel

In recent years, an entire discipline of modern psychology has developed called cognitive behavioral therapy. This breakthrough teaching reveals that many problems, from eating disorders to relational challenges, addictions, and even some forms of depression and anxiety, are rooted in faulty and negative patterns of thinking. Treating those problems begins with changing that thinking.

Winning the War in Your Mind, Zondervan, 2021.

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