Thought Quotes

“Be great in act, as you have been in thought.”

“He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.”

“Faster than spring-time showers comes thought on thought.”

“Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

“Do you not know I am a woman? when I think, I must speak.”

“Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.”

“The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life,--life passed through the fire of thought.”

“I have not slept. Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream: The Genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection.”

“A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.”

“Thou weigh'st thy words before thou givest them breath.”

“We are the prisoners of ideas.”

“Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.”

“A maiden hath no tongue--but thought.”

“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is slicked o'er with the pale cast of thought”

“Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.”

“A just thinker will allow full swing to his scepticism. I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot.... We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.”

“Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.”

“Thought is the property of him who can entertain it, and of him who can adequately place it.”

“A vivid thought brings the power to paint it; and in proportion to the depth of its source is the force of its projection.”

“We do not yet trust the unknown powers of thought. Whence came all these tools, inventions, book laws, parties, kingdoms? Out of the invisible world, through a few brains. The arts and institutions of men are created out of thought. The powers that make the capitalist are metaphysical, the force of method and force of will makes trade, and builds towns.”

“The eye obeys exactly the action of the mind.”

“Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant-and this commonly on the ground of other reading and hearing-that in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.”

“As sunbeams stream through liberal space And nothing jostle or displace, So waved the pine-tree through my thought And fanned the dreams it never brought.”

“Thought dissolves the material universe by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic.”

“Each mind has its own method.”