quotations about thought
Large elements in order brought,
And tracts of calm from tempest made,
And world-wide fluctuation sway'd,
In vassal tides that follow'd thought.
ALFRED TENNYSON
In Memoriam A.H.H.
What you are thinking about, you are becoming.
MUHAMMAD ALI
Esquire, February 2012
My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living.
ANAIS NIN
diary, February 1932
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
DOROTHY L. SAYERS
Gaudy Night
Orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought; it learns not, neither can it forget.
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews
As but a swift glance is enough to catch the glory of a great landscape, or only a little lingering is necessary to observe many peculiar beauties in it, so but a brief turn of the mind to sublime thoughts will give us their light and power.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
Essays
Every thought and feeling is a painting stroke, in the darkness, of our likeness that is to be; and our whole life is but a chamber, which we are frescoing with colors that do not appear while being laid on wet, but which will shine forth afterwards, when finished and dry.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
The great men of earth are the shadowy men, who, having lived and died, now live again and forever through their undying thoughts.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
One thought fills immensity.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Proverbs of Hell
My thoughts and I were of another world.
BEN JONSON
Every Man Out of His Humour
For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Music at Night and Other Essays
It is in our own mind and not in exterior objects that we perceive most things; fools know scarcely anything because they are empty, and their heart is narrow; but great souls find in themselves a number of exterior things; they have no need to read or to travel or to listen or to work to discover the highest truths; they have only to delve into themselves and search, if we may say so, their own thoughts.
LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES
Reflections and Maxims
He trudg'd along, unknowing what he sought,
And whistled as he went, for want of thought.
JOHN DRYDEN
Cymon and Iphigenia
My thoughts were like mercury--always shifting away before I could grab them or form them into a cohesive shape.
DAN SIMMONS
Endymion
If I supply you a thought you may remember it and you may not. But if I can make you think a thought for yourself, I have indeed added to your stature.
ELBERT HUBBARD
The American Bible
The wish is often father to the thought.
JOHN SAUL
Black Lightning
Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal. This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being.
ECKHART TOLLE
The Power of Now
There is nothing worth thinking but it has been thought before; we must only try to think it again.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have, and therefore should be secured, because they seldom return again.
JOHN LOCKE
letter to Mr. Samuel Bold, May 16, 1699
Thought consoles us for all, and heals all. If at times it does you ill, ask it for the remedy for that ill and it will give it to you.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary