quotations about thought
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
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
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
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
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
If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Alias Grace
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
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
Thought and action should be one.
GEBHARD LEBRECHT VON BLUCHER
attributed, Day's Collacon
It is the compelling power of great thoughts and ideas to engender phrases of equal size.
ARISTOPHANES
The Frogs
Ideas are the seeds of thought, but they do not produce flowers unless the soil where they are sown is fertile.
LADY BLESSINGTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
Good thoughts are apt to vanish away if they be not speedily embodied in good actions.
JOHN THORNTON
Maxims and Directions for Youth
For good thoughts (though God accept them) yet, towards men, are little better than good dreams, except they be put in act; and that cannot be, without power and place, as the vantage, and commanding ground.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Great Place", The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral
A person is limited only by the thoughts that he chooses.
JAMES ALLEN
As a Man Thinketh
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Stakes of Diplomacy
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
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
It's the thought that counts.
SWEDISH PROVERB
Great thoughts come from the heart.
LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES
Reflections and Maxims