quotations about thought
My thoughts were like mercury--always shifting away before I could grab them or form them into a cohesive shape.
DAN SIMMONS
Endymion
The wish is often father to the thought.
JOHN SAUL
Black Lightning
I take it to be true that pure thought can grasp the real, as the ancients had dreamed.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Herbert Spencer lecture delivered at Oxford, June 10, 1933
When soul to soul can message send--
Dispatched from mind to mind--
All nations will be swayed by thought,
And thought will rule mankind.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
Thoughts
My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living.
ANAIS NIN
diary, February 1932
I'll put that in my considering cap.
JOHN FLETCHER
The Loyal Subject
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
In the union of noble thoughts and fair phrases the sons of God still marry the daughters of men.
HORACE SMITH
The Tin Trumpet: Or, Heads and Tails for the Wise and Waggish
There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Idiot
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
For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.
KAHLIL GIBRAN
The Prophet
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
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
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.
VICTOR HUGO
Les Misérables
What you are thinking about, you are becoming.
MUHAMMAD ALI
Esquire, February 2012
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 highest stage in moral culture at which we can arrive, is when we recognise that we ought to control our thoughts.
CHARLES DARWIN
The Descent of Man
It is generally accepted that much of our thought is non-verbal, and at least some of it might be inexpressible in language. Notably, language often cannot express the concrete experiences engendered by contemporary art and fails to formulate the kind of abstract thought characteristic of much modern science. Language is not a flawless vehicle for conveying thought and feelings.
PAVLO SHOPIN
"Is language as we know it still relevant for the digital age?", Open Democracy, May 24, 2017
I hold it true that thoughts are things
Endowed with bodies, breath, and wings,
And that we send them forth to fill
The world with good results--or ill.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Secret Thoughts"
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