quotations about 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
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
Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll
A thought embodied and embraced in fit words walks the earth a living being.
E. P. WHIPPLE
attributed, Day's Collacon
If you're up against a smart opponent, make him think himself to death.
C. J. CHERRYH
Chanur's Legacy
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
Thought is the parent. If error has crept in among the little thoughts, and the children have become disobedient and refractory, it is not the parent's fault. Nor must you blame the children either; they are young yet, and you must not expect too much of them.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
Thoughts
An author who sets his reader on sounding the depths of his own thoughts serves him best.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!
JOHN KEATS
letter to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817
It is the compelling power of great thoughts and ideas to engender phrases of equal size.
ARISTOPHANES
The Frogs
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
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
Two heads are better than one.
JOHN HEYWOOD
Proverbs
Ah, the mighty men who conquer,
And the men whose words we drink,
Are the men who quit the jangle,
Quit the turmoil and the wrangle
Of the world, and turn their faces
To secluded, silent places,
Where in solitude they think.
EDGAR GUEST
"Think"
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 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
Thought as such ... is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Negative Dialectics
And a lot of times, the journey of someone who is struggling with mental health issues or with suicidal thoughts is a long, lonely walk.
TERRESA HUMPHRIES-WADSWORTH
"Walking Across Wyoming", Powell Tribune, May 26, 2017
They are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts.
PHILIP SIDNEY
Arcadia
Second thoughts are the adopted children of experience.
ELIZA COOK
"Diamond Dust", Eliza Cook's Journal, Volume 3