Thought Quotes

Most people spend their entire life imprisoned within the confines of their own thoughts. They never go beyond a narrow, mind-made, personalized sense of self that is conditioned by the past.

The ego says, I shouldn't have to suffer, and that thought makes you suffer so much more.

To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.

Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.

By far the greater part of violence that humans inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or mentally deranged, but of normal, respectable citizens service of the collective ego. One can go so far as to say that on this planet "normal" equals insane. What is it that lies at the root of this insanity? Complete identification with thought and emotion, that is to say, ego.

What a dissimilarity we see in walking, swimming, and flying. And yet it is one and the same motion: it is just that the load- bearing capacity of the earth differs from that of the water, and that that of the water differs from that of the air! Thus we should also learn to fly as thinkers--and not imagine that we are thereby becoming idle dreamers!

We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.

Pray, love, remember: and there is pansies, that's for thoughts.

Nothing can occur in your life experience without the invitation of it through your thought.

Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

While swimming in the heavily polluted rivers of south China, despite the pleadings of his security guards and his physician, he would chide his companions if they began to panic in the water: Maybe you're afraid of sinking, Don't think about it. If you don't think about it, you won't sink. If you do, you will.

Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality.

Labor is life; thought is light.

You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware.

Painting is the same kind of problem as unfolding a long, sustained interlocked argument... It is a proposition commanded by a single unity of conception.

Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.

Treat with utmost respect your power of forming opinions, for this power alone guards you against making assumptions that are contrary to nature and judgments that overthrow the rule of reason.

It is not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something.

Before you speak, make certain you have something worthwhile to say.

Man is made or unmade by himself. In the armory of thought he forges the weapons by which he destroys himself. He also fashions the tools with which he builds for himself heavenly mansions of joy and strength and peace.

You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles whe na carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself. Ina man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.

But like infection is the petty thought: it creeps and hides, and wants to be nowhere--until the whole body is decayed and withered by the petty infection... Thus spoke Zarathustra.

The only boundaries we have are in form. There are no obstacles in thought.

Among provocatives, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts during or enduring it than at other times.

A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

The sensual man conforms thoughts to things;the poet conforms things to his thoughts.

In everything, there are two kinds of development-analytical and synthetical. In the former the Hindus excel other nations. In the latter they are nil.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our life is embosomed in beauty.

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.

Our achievements of today are but the sum total of our thoughts of yesterday. You are today where the thoughts of yesterday have brought you and you will be tomorrow where the thoughts of today take you.

The man who reads everything is like the man who eats everything: he can digest nothing, and the penalty of crowding one's mind with other men's thoughts is to have no thoughts of one's own.

As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

It is so rare to meet with a man outdoors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is independent of the labor of his hands. Behind every man's busy-ness there should be a level of undisturbed serenity and industry, as within the reef encircling a coral isle there is always an expanse of still water, where the depositions are going on which will finally raise it above the surface.

Nothing pains some people more than having to think

It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.

All great ideas are dangerous.

A man cannot utter two or three sentences without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or in that of ideas and imagination, or in the realm of intuitions and duty.

The human mind has first to construct forms, independently, before we can find them in things.

Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.

Hammer your thoughts into unity.

True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself.

I think, therefore I doubt.

There is a wide difference between the original thinker and the merely learned man.

Madness is to think of too many things in succession too fast, or of one thing too exclusively.

Whether we will philosophize or we won't philosophize, we must philosophize.

To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein

One who is caught in thought loses one's original nature. All he knows are words and descriptions. When he sees the actual thing, he fails to perceive it.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His mind moves upon silence.

To contemplate is to look at shadows.

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

The actuality of thought is life.

I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering.

Don't let anybody walk through your mind with dirty feet.

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