quotations about thought
Thought obeys no natural law. In a stream of water, time works the way it usually does in nature -- the future passes into the present and then into the past. In thought, the past might pour into the present and then drain away into the future. Or the future might rain into the past as the present disappears. Thought is not like a natural thing. Thought is literally the essence of the artificial.
MICHAEL W. CLUNE
"Thought Against Life: Cyrus Console's 'Romanian Notebook'", L.A. Review of Books, May 21, 2017
Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Spectator, April 18, 1981
Every thought and feeling is a painting stroke, in the darkness, of our likeness that is to be; and our whole life is but a chamber, which we are frescoing with colors that do not appear while being laid on wet, but which will shine forth afterwards, when finished and dry.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Each flying thought, a flying thought pursues.
C. B. LANGSTON
"Thought"
Orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought; it learns not, neither can it forget.
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews
Great thoughts, like great deeds, need no trumpet.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Festus
Thought is valuable in proportion as it is generative.
EDWARD BULWER LYTTON
Caxtoniana
Action helps thought, and thought helps action. By action thought is rendered more masculine, attains to greater breadth, and acquires a certain nobleness and dignity. Thanks to thought, action may become more definite, more precise, more fruitful.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living.
ANAIS NIN
diary, February 1932
There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And You are but a Thought -- a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.
MARK TWAIN
The Mysterious Stranger
The great men of earth are the shadowy men, who, having lived and died, now live again and forever through their undying thoughts.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
It is doubtful whether our present system of popular education does not retard independent or self thinking as much as it promotes it. All genuine education is self-education. It will incite the individual to think for himself, by rethinking what the race's great thinkers have already thought for him, thus enabling him to go ahead under his own mental steam.
JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON
The Field of Philosophy
Some men of a secluded and studious life, have sent forth from their closet or their cloister, rays of intellectual light that have agitated courts, and revolutionized kingdoms; like the moon, that far removed from the ocean, and shining upon it with a serene and sober light, is the chief cause of all those ebbings and flowings which incessantly disturb that world of waters.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
There is nothing worth thinking but it has been thought before; we must only try to think it again.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
It is in our own mind and not in exterior objects that we perceive most things; fools know scarcely anything because they are empty, and their heart is narrow; but great souls find in themselves a number of exterior things; they have no need to read or to travel or to listen or to work to discover the highest truths; they have only to delve into themselves and search, if we may say so, their own thoughts.
LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES
Reflections and Maxims
Never know whose thoughts you're chewing.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
To follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one's pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
Our thoughts are like roots which reach out in every direction into the cosmic ocean of formless energy, and these thought-roots set in motion vibrations like themselves and attract the affinities of our desires and ambitions.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
The Miracle of Right Thought
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Stakes of Diplomacy
If what we think now is different from what we thought then, we can take it for granted that what we think in a year will be different again.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta