quotations about thought
Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Locksley Hall
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
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
Each flying thought, a flying thought pursues.
C. B. LANGSTON
"Thought"
A person is limited only by the thoughts that he chooses.
JAMES ALLEN
As a Man Thinketh
Thought is pure energy. Every thought you have, have ever had, and ever will have is creative. The energy of your thought never ever dies. Ever. It leaves your being and heads out into the universe, extending forever. A thought is forever.
NEALE DONALD WALSCH
Conversations with God
We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail. It is in the nature of things that we always fail, because we suddenly find it impossible to order our thoughts, because the process of thinking requires us to consider every thought there is, every possible thought. Fundamentally we have always failed, like all the others, whoever they were, even the greatest minds. At some point, they suddenly failed and their system collapsed, as is proved by their writings, which we admire because they venture farthest into failure. To think is to fail, I thought.
THOMAS BERNHARD
Extinction
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
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
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
Second thoughts are the adopted children of experience.
ELIZA COOK
"Diamond Dust", Eliza Cook's Journal, Volume 3
Great thoughts, like great deeds, need no trumpet.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Festus
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
Good thoughts are apt to vanish away if they be not speedily embodied in good actions.
JOHN THORNTON
Maxims and Directions for Youth
To think's audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
Great thoughts come from the heart.
LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES
Reflections and Maxims
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
And yet, as angels in some brighter dreams
Call to the soul when man doth sleep,
So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes,
And into glory peep.
HENRY VAUGHN
They are all gone into the World of Light
A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.
LEV S. VYGOTSKY
Thought and Language