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
When thoughts cannot find vent and utterance in action, the mind ceases to think. It will not continue to produce its mighty births of power and beauty, to see them fall dead-born into the world, or to be strangled in embryo.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
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
A man has a right to think lots of things he has no right to say.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
Maid in Waiting
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
People, in all but the most favored times and places, are rooted to the places where they were born, think the thoughts of those places, can endure no other thoughts. The next parish even is suspected.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
The most dangerous thief is unwholesome thought.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
The Gospel of Buddha
Thought
Has joys apart, even in blackest woe,
And seizing some fine thread of verity
Knows momentary godhead.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Spanish Gypsy
A great thought is best dressed in the simplest language.
CHARLES NORDHOFF
attributed, Day's Collacon
A thought embodied and embraced in fit words walks the earth a living being.
E. P. WHIPPLE
attributed, Day's Collacon
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"
An author who sets his reader on sounding the depths of his own thoughts serves him best.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
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
Borrowed thoughts, like borrowed money, only reveal the poverty that necessitates the loan.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
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
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
Hold fast, therefore, O circular philosopher, to thy centre, and drive the globe along its orbit by the momentum of thy thought.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
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
If you're up against a smart opponent, make him think himself to death.
C. J. CHERRYH
Chanur's Legacy