THOUGHT QUOTES VI

quotations about thought

A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.

LEV S. VYGOTSKY

Thought and Language


Alas! we make a ladder of our thoughts, where angels step, but sleep ourselves at the foot; our high resolve look down upon our slumbering acts.

LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON

The Venetian Bracelet: The Lost Pleiad


Though old the thought and oft expressed,
'Tis his at last who says it best.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

For an Autograph


The world is your kaleidoscope, and the varying combinations of colours, which at every succeeding moment it presents to you are the exquisitely adjusted pictures of your ever-moving thoughts.

JAMES ALLEN

As a Man Thinketh


The wise man hath his thoughts in his head; the fool, on his tongue.

IVAN PANIN

Thoughts


Words are but the shining garments of Thought.

EDWIN LEIBFREED

"The Song of the Soul"

Tags: Edwin Leibfreed


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

Tags: Charles Caleb Colton


Thought exists at the farthest remove from the vocalizations of the human animal.

MICHAEL W. CLUNE

"Thought Against Life: Cyrus Console's 'Romanian Notebook'", L.A. Review of Books, May 21, 2017


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


Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

letter to Lucy Donnely, November 25, 1902

Tags: Bertrand Russell


Every wheatfield of human thought after a while becomes filled with cockle; then the husbandmen destroy the grain with the cockle and plant anew.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought


Thought, stumbling, plods
Past fallen temples, vanished gods,
Altars unincensed, fanes undecked,
Eternal systems flown or wrecked;
Through trackless centuries that grant
To the poor trudge refreshment scant,
Age after age, pants on to find
A melting mirage of the mind.

ALFRED AUSTIN

"A Defence of English Spring", Lyrical Poems

Tags: Alfred Austin


My thoughts are my company; I can bring them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR

Imaginary Conversations

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Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.

WALTER LIPPMANN

The Stakes of Diplomacy

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People can live very simple lives, can't they? Tucked away, without thinking. I think the world is what you enter when you think--when you become educated, when you question--because you can be in the big world and be utterly provincial.

V. S. NAIPAUL

The Paris Review, fall 1998

Tags: V. S. Naipaul


Trying to write an inspiring memoir while repressing such thoroughly uninspiring thoughts is a path to madness.

RON CHARLES

"'Woman No. 17' a juice box of suburban satire", Denver Post, May 26, 2017


Mankind will be enslaved until there is mental grandeur enough to allow each man to have his thought and say. This earth will be a paradise when men can, upon all these questions differ, and yet grasp each other's hands as friends.

ROBERT G. INGERSOLL

Some Mistakes of Moses


Good thoughts are apt to vanish away if they be not speedily embodied in good actions.

JOHN THORNTON

Maxims and Directions for Youth


O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!

JOHN KEATS

letter to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817

Tags: John Keats


Two heads are better than one.

JOHN HEYWOOD

Proverbs

Tags: John Heywood