THOUGHT QUOTES V

quotations about thought

Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

WALTER BENJAMIN

Reflections

Tags: Walter Benjamin


Hold fast, therefore, O circular philosopher, to thy centre, and drive the globe along its orbit by the momentum of thy thought.

AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT

Table Talk

Tags: Amos Bronson Alcott


Thought breeds thought; children familiar with great thoughts take as naturally to thinking for themselves as the well-nourished body takes to growing; and we must bear in mind that growth, physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual, is the sole end of education.

CHARLOTTE M. MASON

The Original Home Schooling Series


Thought
Has joys apart, even in blackest woe,
And seizing some fine thread of verity
Knows momentary godhead.

GEORGE ELIOT

The Spanish Gypsy

Tags: George Eliot


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.

HORACE MANN

Thoughts

Tags: Horace Mann


A man has a right to think lots of things he has no right to say.

EDGAR WATSON HOWE

Country Town Sayings

Tags: Edgar Watson Howe


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


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


Thought, stumbling, plods
Past fallen temples, vanished gods,
Altars unincensed, fanes undecked,
Eternal systems flown or wrecked;
Through trackless centuries that grant
To the poor trudge refreshment scant,
Age after age, pants on to find
A melting mirage of the mind.

ALFRED AUSTIN

"A Defence of English Spring", Lyrical Poems

Tags: Alfred Austin


Whether thoughts and ideas manifest in a material outcome depends on our transmission of them into perceived reality.

LY DE ANGELES

Tarot Theory and Practice


The most dangerous thief is unwholesome thought.

GAUTAMA BUDDHA

The Gospel of Buddha

Tags: Buddha


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

E. P. WHIPPLE

attributed, Day's Collacon


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


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

Tags: Walter Bagehot


Clearness is the ornament of deep thought.

LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES

Reflections and Maxims


An author who sets his reader on sounding the depths of his own thoughts serves him best.

AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT

Table Talk

Tags: Amos Bronson Alcott


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


The course of history has often been turned by sentiment, but by thought never. The thinkers are but valuable ornaments. A safe place is assigned to them on the world's mantelpiece, while humanity basks and blinks stupidly on the hearth.

MAX BEERBOHM

The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm

Tags: Max Beerbohm


Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!

ROBERT G. INGERSOLL

The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll

Tags: Robert Green Ingersoll