Trade with thoughts as with gold.
You may glean knowledge by reading, but you must separate the chaff from the wheat by thinking.
JOHN THORNTON, Maxims and Directions for Youth
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 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
I love not to be choked with other men's thoughts.
- A fickle goddess Thought at times--
- Try ne'er so hard we catch her not.
- We try to think: 'tis all in vain--
- Imprisoned never is a thought.
- Like lightning flashing through the clouds,
- It comes--a light, and then is gone,
- A star which falls adown through space,
- Again it comes as morning dawn.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON, "What is Thought?"
- Thoughts ... have tarried in my mind and peopled its inner chambers,
- The sober children of reason, or desultory train of fancy.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER, Proverbial Philosophy
Thoughts are so great--aren't they, sir? They seem to lie upon us like a great flood.
Thought is the parent. If error has crept in among the little thoughts, and the children have become disobedient and refractory, it is not the parent's fault. Nor must you blame the children either; they are young yet, and you must not expect too much of them.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON, Thoughts
- Thought
- Has joys apart, even in blackest woe,
- And seizing some fine thread of verity
- Knows momentary godhead.
GEORGE ELIOT, The Spanish Gypsy
Two heads are better than one.
It is doubtful whether our present system of popular education does not retard independent or self thinking as much as it promotes it. All genuine education is self-education. It will incite the individual to think for himself, by rethinking what the race's great thinkers have already thought for him, thus enabling him to go ahead under his own mental steam.
JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON, The Field of Philosophy
The most weighty truths may strike, but without meditation cannot enter and influence the mind.
JOHN THORNTON, Maxims and Directions for Youth
Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better than we are.
GEORGE ELIOT, Mr. Gilfil's Love Story
Good thoughts, though God accept them, yet towards men are little better than good dreams, except they be put in act.
Speaking without thinking is shooting without taking aim.
JOHN THORNTON, Maxims and Directions for Youth
An artist carrying a thought from his mind into expression is like a child bearing a bucket brimming with water from the well to the house--part of the content is spilled.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
They are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts.
When thoughts cannot find vent and utterance in action, the mind ceases to think. It will not continue to produce its mighty births of power and beauty, to see them fall dead-born into the world, or to be strangled in embryo.
He who influences the thought of his times influences all the times that follow. He has made his impress on eternity.
ELBERT HUBBARD, The American Bible
It is not the man that gives me most of outward things that helps me to live; but the man who gives me thoughts and ideas by which a wider sweep of beauty opens to my vision, and kindles in my holy affections, by which I rise nearer to God.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Nothing in this world requires such long seasoning and ripening as new thoughts.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Thoughts are as the sands of the seashore--infinite.
The man who gives me a new thought enriches me.
REUEN THOMAS, Thoughts for the Thoughtful
Good thoughts are apt to vanish away if they be not speedily embodied in good actions.
JOHN THORNTON, Maxims and Directions for Youth
Some men of a secluded and studious life, have sent forth from their closet or their cloister, rays of intellectual light that have agitated courts, and revolutionized kingdoms; like the moon, that far removed from the ocean, and shining upon it with a serene and sober light, is the chief cause of all those ebbings and flowings which incessantly disturb that world of waters.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon
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
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
Call one thought, and another will follow.
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
Back to Thought Quotes
