THOUGHT QUOTES VI

quotations about thought

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

Tags: V. S. Naipaul


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

Tags: Charles Caleb Colton


Though old the thought and oft expressed,
'Tis his at last who says it best.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

For an Autograph


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

Tags: Bertrand Russell


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


Clearness is the ornament of deep thought.

LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES

Reflections and Maxims


Thought as such ... is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it.

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Negative Dialectics


Call one thought, and another will follow.

EDWARD COUNSEL

Maxims


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


A thought embodied and embraced in fit words walks the earth a living being.

E. P. WHIPPLE

attributed, Day's Collacon


Thought is merely a property of matter, like the other properties of matter such as mass, motion, color.

ANEELA SHAHZAD

"Mind--The Hard Problem", Daily Pakistan, May 26, 2017


They are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts.

PHILIP SIDNEY

Arcadia

Tags: Sir Philip Sidney


Unlike a fountain that circulates the same water in an enclosed, perpetually recycling system, a human being circulates thoughts in an unlimited reservoir of self.

VERA NAZARIAN

The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration


Thought exists at the farthest remove from the vocalizations of the human animal.

MICHAEL W. CLUNE

"Thought Against Life: Cyrus Console's 'Romanian Notebook'", L.A. Review of Books, May 21, 2017


Borrowed thoughts, like borrowed money, only reveal the poverty that necessitates the loan.

ELIZA COOK

Diamond Dust

Tags: Eliza Cook


O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!

JOHN KEATS

letter to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817

Tags: John Keats


The history of human thought recalls the swinging of a pendulum which takes centuries to swing. After a long period of slumber comes a moment of awakening. Then thought frees herself from the chains with which those interested -- rulers, lawyers, clerics -- have carefully enwound her. She shatters the chains. She subjects to severe criticism all that has been taught her, and lays bare the emptiness of the religious political, legal, and social prejudices amid which she has vegetated. She starts research in new paths, enriches our knowledge with new discoveries, creates new sciences.

PETER KROPOTKIN

Anarchist Morality

Tags: Peter Kropotkin


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

Tags: Winston Churchill


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

Tags: Walter Lippmann