Thought Quotes

A thought that sometimes makes me hazy: Am I - or are the others crazy?

Eleanor went to her room "where she was free to think and be wretched.

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.

The front aspect of great thoughts can only be enjoyed by those who stand on the side whence they arrive.

Thought is the strongest thing we have.

A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.

The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour perfectly harmonised; it is true to life. On the other hand, the intellectual attainments of the mere man of learning are like a large palette, full of all sorts of colours, which at most are systematically arranged, but devoid of harmony, connection and meaning.

In you, as in each human being, there is a dimension of consciousness far deeper than thought. It is the very essence of who you are. We may call it presence, awareness, the unconditioned consciousness.

I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.

Action is the process whereby what is not fully formed passes into expressive consciousness.

Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

The key to every man is his thought.

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

The more I get to thinking, the less I tend to laugh.

Men talk of freedom! How many are free to think? Free from fear, from perturbation, from prejudice? Nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand are perfect slaves.

Well, the world has a million writers. One would think, then, that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books; nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.

Act is the blossom of thought; and joy and suffering are its fruits; thus does a man garner in the sweet and biter fruitage of his own husbandry

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Never trust a thought that didn't come by walking.

Human intellect is incurably abstract.

There are two distinct classes of what are called thoughts: those that we produce in ourselves by reflection and the act of thinking and those that bolt into the mind of their own accord.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.

Thought depends absolutely on the stomach, but in spite of that, those who have the best stomachs are not the best thinkers.

Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.

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

There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation.

What you do makes you better at what you think. What you think makes you more effective at what you do.

Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom. It is the result of long and patient effort in self-control. Its presence is an indication of ripened experience, and of a more than ordinary knowledge of the laws and operations of thought.

The great events of the world take place in the brain.

I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion.

So many hours must I take my rest;So many hours must I contemplate.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

A book can never be anything more than the impression of its author’s thoughts. The value of these thoughts lies either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form in which he develops his matter — that is to say, what he has thought about it.

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts; And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime. And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.

Power is what they want, not candy-power to execute their design, power to give legs and feet, form and actuality to their thought; which, to a clear-sighted man, appears the end for which the universe exists, and all its resources might be well applied.

How insupportable would be the days, if the night with its dews and darkness did not come to restore the drooping world. As the shades begin to gather around us, our primeval instincts are aroused, and we steal forth from our lairs, like the inhabitants of the jungle, in search of those silent and brooding thoughts which are the natural prey of the intellect.

Living truth is that alone which has its origins in thinking. Just as a tree bears year after year the same fruit which is each year new, so must all permanently valuable ideas be continually born again in thought.

If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the 'I' and the 'self' that 'I' cannot live with. Maybe, I thought, only one of them is real.

The more you have thought and written on a given theme, the more you can still write. Thought breeds thought. It grows under your hands.

Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.

I like to have space to spread my mind out in.

Those great efforts of intellect, upon which the mind sometimes touches, are such that it cannot maintain itself there. It only leaps to them, not as upon a throne, forever, but merely for an instant.

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.

Thought makes everything fit for use.

Bodies devoid of mind are as statues in the market place.

The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.

I sailed on the North River last night with my flute, and my music was a tinkling stream which meandered with the river, and fell from note to note as a brook from rock to rock. I did not hear the strains after they had issued from the flute, but before they were breathed into it, for the original strain precedes the sound by as much as the echo follows after, and the rest is the perquisite of the rocks and trees and beasts. Unpremeditated music is the true gauge which measures the current of our thoughts, the very undertow of our life's stream.

Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are playing in the sky.

We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the clouds which came and went on the western sky, and the mother-o'-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there.

It is not men that interest or disturb me primarily; it is ideas. Ideas live; men die.

Death is easier to bear without thinking of it, than the thought of death without peril.

She says it has nothing to do with what you look like, or what you have. It has only to do with what you think of and what you do.

To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words- to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam. It is the same with thinking, which is really silent talking. It is not, by itself, open to the discovery of anything new, for its only novelties are simply arrangements of old words and ideas.

The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman, the Austrian and the American.

The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's.

Philosophers are in the habit of setting themselves before life and experience.