#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.”

“When a man thinks happily, he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses. All spontaneous thought is irrespective of all else.”

“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.”

“And what avails it that science has come to treat space and time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical, and withal our pretension of property and even of self-hood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities, but the incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which yesterday was a finality, to-day is yielding to a larger generalization?”

“Character repudiates intellect, yet excites it; and character passes into thought, is published so, and then is ashamed before newflashes of moral worth.”

“Works of the intellect are great only by comparison with each other.”

“The native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought; and enterprises of great pitch and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action.”

“The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation repeated.”

“Logic is the procession or proportionate unfolding of the intuition; but its virtue is as silent method; the moment it would appear as propositions, and have a separate value, it is worthless.”

“My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man That function is smothered in surmise, And nothing is but what is not.”

“There was never anything that did not proceed from a thought.”

“What, all so soon asleep! I wish mine eyes Would, with themselves, shut up my thoughts.”

“The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.”

“Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought.”

“There is an intimate interdependence of intellect and morals.”

“The key to every man is his thought.”

“Private, accidental, confidential conversation breeds thought. Clubs produce oftener words.”

“Nimble thought can jump both sea and land.”

“Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.”

“One single idea may have greater weight than all the men, animals, and machines for a century.”

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

“A man is what he thinks about all day long.”

“The conscious utterance of thought, by speech or action, to any end, is art.”

“The solitary knows the essence of the thought, the scholar in society only its fair face.”

“There are faces so fluid with expression, so flushed and rippled by the play of thought, that we can hardly find what the mere features really are. When the delicious beauty of lineament loses its power, it is because a more delicious beauty has appeared, that an interior and durable form has been disclosed.”

“A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind.”