quotations about thought
Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Dialectic of Enlightenment
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
Though old the thought and oft expressed,
'Tis his at last who says it best.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
For an Autograph
And Thought leapt out to wed with Thought,
Ere Thought could wed itself with Speech.
ALFRED TENNYSON
In Memoriam A.H.H.
People, in all but the most favored times and places, are rooted to the places where they were born, think the thoughts of those places, can endure no other thoughts. The next parish even is suspected.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And You are but a Thought -- a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.
MARK TWAIN
The Mysterious Stranger
Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Spectator, April 18, 1981
Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose,
Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart
Made purple riot.
JOHN KEATS
"The Eve of Saint Agnes"
He trudg'd along, unknowing what he sought,
And whistled as he went, for want of thought.
JOHN DRYDEN
Cymon and Iphigenia
My thoughts and I were of another world.
BEN JONSON
Every Man Out of His Humour
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
DOROTHY L. SAYERS
Gaudy Night
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
ARISTOTLE
Metaphysics
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
Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
DORIS LESSING
The Times, November 23, 2003
To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
Man is made or unmade by himself. In the armory of thought he forges the weapons by which he destroys himself. He also fashions the tools with which he builds for himself heavenly mansions of joy and strength and peace.
JAMES ALLEN
As a Man Thinketh
A thought is harmless unless we believe it.
BYRON KATIE
Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
All you really have to contribute is what you think.
BARRY DILLER
Playboy, July 1989
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
My thoughts were like mercury--always shifting away before I could grab them or form them into a cohesive shape.
DAN SIMMONS
Endymion