quotations about thought
Words are but the shining garments of Thought.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Song of the Soul"
The delicate thought that cannot find expression,
For ruder speech too fair,
That, like thy petals, trembles in possession,
And scatters on the air.
BRET HARTE
"The Mountain Heart's Ease"
Whether thoughts and ideas manifest in a material outcome depends on our transmission of them into perceived reality.
LY DE ANGELES
Tarot Theory and Practice
Borrowed thoughts, like borrowed money, only reveal the poverty that necessitates the loan.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Call one thought, and another will follow.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
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.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
radio broadcast, "The Defence of Freedom and Peace (The Lights are Going Out)", October 16, 1938
Man being made a reasonable, and so a thinking creature, there is nothing more worthy of his being, than the right direction and employment of his thoughts; since upon this depends both his usefulness to the public, and his own present and future benefit in all respects.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
Great thoughts in crude, unshapely verse set forth lose half their preciousness, and ever must, unless the diamond with its own rich dust be cut and polished, it seems little worth.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"On Reading---"
Thought as such ... is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Negative Dialectics
Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Pebble in the Sky
A man has a right to think lots of things he has no right to say.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
A thought embodied and embraced in fit words walks the earth a living being.
E. P. WHIPPLE
attributed, Day's Collacon
If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Cut off, or cut free, from speech, thought assumes its baroque writerly structures. Speech in a language of which he knows only a few words involves the conscious, patient, awkward, hilarious, and typically unsuccessful translation of thought. This process illuminates the gulf between thought and speech, which is not quite identical to the gulf between inside and outside.
MICHAEL W. CLUNE
"Thought Against Life: Cyrus Console's 'Romanian Notebook'", L.A. Review of Books, May 21, 2017
You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Culture and Value
Every thought is a prayer and we should use words and thoughts to manifest good.
ANNA JACYSZYN
"The power of grateful thinking", The Daily Courier, May 30, 2017
Thought is merely a property of matter, like the other properties of matter such as mass, motion, color.
ANEELA SHAHZAD
"Mind--The Hard Problem", Daily Pakistan, May 26, 2017
Thought is not made in a vacuum, nor created out of likeness. It requires travel and shipping and the coming and going of strangers to impregnate a civilization. That is why thought has flourished in cities which lie along the paths of communication. Nineveh, Athens, Alexandria, Rome, Venice, the Hansa towns, London, Paris -- they have made ideas out of the movement and contact of many people. Men are jostled into thought. Left alone they spin the same thread from the same dream. A community which is self-contained and homogeneous and secluded is intellectually deaf, dumb, and blind. It can cultivate robust virtue and simple dogmatism, but it will not invent or throw out a profusion of ideas.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Stakes of Diplomacy
Upon the cunning loom of thought
We weave our fancies, so and so.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
Cloth of Gold
They are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts.
PHILIP SIDNEY
Arcadia