quotations about thought
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
Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
DORIS LESSING
The Times, November 23, 2003
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
My thoughts and I were of another world.
BEN JONSON
Every Man Out of His Humour
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
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.
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
DOROTHY L. SAYERS
Gaudy Night
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
If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.
ROALD DAHL
The Twits
Orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought; it learns not, neither can it forget.
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews
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
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
One thought fills immensity.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Proverbs of Hell
A thought is harmless unless we believe it.
BYRON KATIE
Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
He trudg'd along, unknowing what he sought,
And whistled as he went, for want of thought.
JOHN DRYDEN
Cymon and Iphigenia
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
ARISTOTLE
Metaphysics
The wish is often father to the thought.
JOHN SAUL
Black Lightning
All you really have to contribute is what you think.
BARRY DILLER
Playboy, July 1989
Thought is what makes humans human ... It's the luminous spark of reason that grants us lordship over the animals, endows us with cell phones, and offers hope, even in our darkest hours, that our species will somehow calculate the way forward to a brighter tomorrow.
BRUNO MADDOX
Discover Magazine, May 2006
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