Quotes & Sayings About Reacting Without Thinking

The trick to being a good actor is getting so involved in your character that the camera disappears, the 50 bored guys eating doughnuts disappear, friends disappear. To get to that point when you don't have to think about it, you're just acting and reacting in those circumstances. — Val Kilmer

I'm just a man. I think people are reacting to something else when they see me. They're not reacting to me, Eddie Murphy. They don't even know me. It's just luck and the God in me they're reacting to. — Eddie Murphy

Real life is about reacting quickly to the opportunity at hand, not the opportunity you envisioned. Not thinking and scheming for the future, but letting it happen. — Conan O'Brien

I can't help moving my face - reacting - when I watch a movie, because I'm really inhabiting a character. I know this is weird, but it demonstrates what I love about cinema: it allows you to live a different life, to have a different experience, to disappear for two hours. I think it's wonderful. — Emma Stone

This game, it seems when you play it the best, is when you're not really thinking a lot and just reacting and keeping it at its simplest point - just see it and hit it. — Jason Giambi

If you wish to find your answers, you'll need to begin thinking, not merely reacting.
Lily — Seanan McGuire

The violent, antirationalistic impulse in Western countries is reacting to an intellectual state of affairs in which all thinking has become strategy; this impulse shows a disgust for a certain form of self-preservation. It is a sensitive shivering from the cold breath of a reality where knowledge is power and power is knowledge — Peter Sloterdijk

Many of the people I've worked with in family groups have been that obsessed with people they care about. When I asked them what they were feeling, they told me what the other person was feeling. When I asked what they did, they told me what the other person had done. Their entire focus was on someone or something other than themselves. Some of them had spent years of their lives doing this - worrying about, reacting to, and trying to control other human beings. They were shells, sometimes almost invisible shells, of people. Their energy was depleted - directed at someone else. They couldn't tell me what they were feeling and thinking because they didn't know. Their focus was not on themselves. — Melody Beattie

When we latch on to an identity, it is easy to take offense. But we offend ourselves. We lock ourselves into very rigid ways of seeing and thinking and feeling and reacting. It doesn't have to be this way. The fact is, I'm not anything in particular. Nor are you. Nor is anyone. — Steve Hagen

The elevator doors opened on the first floor and Van Holtz was waiting there with several bags of groceries in his hands.
"Oh. You," he said. He started to walk in and, without thinking, simply reacting, Bo shoved him back out of the elevator by his head and hit the elevator button again.
"You asshole!" Bo heard as the door closed. — Shelly Laurenston

When we latch on to an identity, it's easy to take offence. But we offend ourselves. We lock ourselves into very rigid ways of seeing and thinking and reacting. — Steve Hagen

Sounds like the effect of wolf's blood to me," he said, winking at her.
"You think?"
"Attacking without thinking? Just reacting instantly? Yeah, that's wolf mentality. — Franca Storm

It's hard work. It's really hard work, but it's really interesting. We have this camera, I think it's called a SimulCam, and when you play it back, you can see the giant in the scene you just shot. It's incredible. You're reacting to a tennis ball that's way up there, then when you watch it, it's this huge giant's face on it. Wow. That's cool. I just can't wait to see it when it's all edited together and the special effects are all crystal clear. It's going to be, hopefully, amazing. — Eleanor Tomlinson

There's a kind of chemical spark that comes sometimes with the character, that you don't even have to think about how she is reacting, you just let yourself go. You just let the character take you, instead of taking the character. — Ludivine Sagnier

It's not like I prepare anymore, or have to think about my son being dead to get emotional. If you're working with a good actor and you're reacting off of them and you have a good script, it just comes organically. It's just stored in your body. So that emotion will just be brought out of you, as opposed to trying to force it. — Maria Bello

There's still too much energy leftover at this tomb-desk, on Broadway, when I am semi-asleep at night in our bedroom, struggling to get a good night's rest. There's an overflow of loin energy. It spills out from my pores as if I were a cracked drum of reacting chemicals. I need to work to expend this excess energy in words, stories and books ... My mind is a body that's a mind. — Sergio Troncoso

I don't think people are reacting primarily to the danger of the sport. There are many other activities that are truly dangerous that we have no inclination to ban. — Jonathan Gottschall

With 'Kids React,' it started, hilariously enough, by thinking, 'Why, teenage girls seem to love 'Twilight' so much!' We went from wanting to ask them ourselves to coming up with the larger and more universal concept of a bunch of Kids reacting to viral videos. — Rafi Fine

As a librarian, saving lives and worlds isn't in my purview, although if I could put those on my resume with a straight face, I would. Saving minds, however ... perhaps it's not as farfetched. A mind can be lost without its owner's death. A mind that no longer questions only fulfills the rudimentary aspects of its function. A mind without wonder is a mere engine, a walking parasympathetic nervous system, seeing without observing, reacting without thinking, a forgotten ghost in a passive machine. — Josh Hanagarne

I reacted to other people's feelings, behaviors, problems, and thoughts. I reacted to what they might by feeling, thinking, or doing. I reacted to my own feelings, my own thoughts, my own problems. My strong point seemed to be reacting to crises - I thought almost everything was a crisis. I overreacted. — Melody Beattie

We are so inside our own heads we think people are talking about us, thinking about us, writing about us. Think about this (get it?) - when you see a post on Facebook about someone... who know the type of post I am talking about...directed at 'someone'. They may not have mentioned a name. But sometimes for a split second, you think its about YOU. Thats how much inside our own heads we are! Kinda crazy hey? Even if you don't do it regularly, you can remember a time when you have. Can't you? Thats how big our ego is. It even talks to us through other peoples actions. But what if you asked yourself a different question? What if you asked 'what does it mean to them?' 'What are they going through that means they are reacting that way?' What if this meant that you no longer 'judged'? What if? — Emma Perrow

I try when I'm writing to leave enough "space" for people to have their own interpretation, and not to direct it toward one conclusion. Then the audience would not be reacting, because they are being preached to or lectured at. I don't have that much to say that I think people should listen to me. — Charlie Kaufman

I don't put any thought into the footballs after I choose them. When you're out there playing in front of 70,000 people, like a home crowd, you don't think about it. You're just reacting to the game. — Tom Brady

It's interesting to look at your children as line-in Zen masters who can put their finger on places where you're resistant, or thinking narrowly, in ways noone else can. You can either lose your mind and your authenticity in the process of reacting to all that stuff, or you can use it as the perfect opportunity to grow and nourish your children by attending to what is deepest and best in them and in yourself. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

I found that whenever I encountered a situation, rather than just reacting to it, it was tremendously useful to think carefully about how I should react to it and other situations like it. Besides providing me with more thoughtful responses in each of these cases, approaching things this way provided me and others with guidance on how to deal with similar situations when they came up in the future. — Ray Dalio

Emotion operates, very often when you think about how you react to the world, you know, something is happening to you, you're simply going along and you're being confronted by different things, not necessarily very important or significance for your ultimate life, but you are constantly reacting to the world. — Antonio Damasio

Seeds not planted or tended by choice tend to be weeds, so at least for me, it's very helpful to consciously and periodically choose which seeds I want to water, and to think through what I expect to happen from that watering. Investors can spend a lot of time and energy reacting to the latest bits of news and trying to predict the next surprise, rather than choosing a consistent set of daily actions that they can carry out as things develop, regardless of how they develop. — John Houseman

Before you look down upon the cripple, understand why you walk. Before you judge the dumb, understand why you talk. Before you judge the deaf, understand why you listen and hear. Before you judge the blind, understand why you look and see. Before you speak negative, understand why positive speech exists. Before you think negative, understand why positive thinking exists. Before you react negatively, understand why reacting positively exist. There exist positive and negative choices always. You have a choice. Good or bad, you choose! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I did some years of therapy and self-realization, and I just move and think at a slower pace - doesn't make me sound very smart! But really not reacting and doing more listening than talking, and letting people say what they need to say, and then maybe not saying anything at all. — Natalie Maines

When we are devoted to the development of kindness, it becomes our ready response, so that reacting from compassion, from caring, is not a question of giving ourselves a lecture: 'I don't really feel like it, but I'd better be helpful, or what would people think?' — Sharon Salzberg

All my books are accidental books - they come from reacting to things and thinking about things and engaging in a real way. They are not about, 'Oh, did it get a good review in the Guardian?' I don't care. — Arundhati Roy

Reacting is automatic, but thinking is not. — David Allen

Day by day, morning by morning, begin your walk with Him in the calm trust that God is at work in everything ... It is your personal business, as a discipline of your heart, to learn to be peaceful and safe in God in every situation ... Remember, friend, where your real living is going on. In your thinking, in your reacting, in your heart of hearts - here is where your walk with God begins and continues. So when you start to move into trusting Him, stay there. Don't wander out again into worry and doubt! — Anne Ortlund