quotations about thought
Thought is not made in a vacuum, nor created out of likeness. It requires travel and shipping and the coming and going of strangers to impregnate a civilization. That is why thought has flourished in cities which lie along the paths of communication. Nineveh, Athens, Alexandria, Rome, Venice, the Hansa towns, London, Paris -- they have made ideas out of the movement and contact of many people. Men are jostled into thought. Left alone they spin the same thread from the same dream. A community which is self-contained and homogeneous and secluded is intellectually deaf, dumb, and blind. It can cultivate robust virtue and simple dogmatism, but it will not invent or throw out a profusion of ideas.
WALTER LIPPMANN
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The Stakes of Diplomacy
A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.
MAHATMA GANDHI
attributed, Ethical Religion (Ganesan)
Words are but the shining garments of Thought.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Song of the Soul"
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
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
It's the thought that counts.
SWEDISH PROVERB
O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!
JOHN KEATS
letter to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817
A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
Maid in Waiting
The idea that being in love and having beautiful kids you would die for is going to prevent suicidal thoughts is a lie.
JULIE A. FAST
"Chris Cornell: When Suicide Doesn't Make Sense", Psychology Today, May 19, 2017
A person is limited only by the thoughts that he chooses.
JAMES ALLEN
As a Man Thinketh
Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Reflections
A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
radio broadcast, "The Defence of Freedom and Peace (The Lights are Going Out)", October 16, 1938
What exile from himself can flee?
To zones, though more and more remote,
Still, still pursues, where'er I be,
The blight of life--the demon Thought.
LORD BYRON
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
A great thought is best dressed in the simplest language.
CHARLES NORDHOFF
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
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
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
My thoughts are my company; I can bring them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.
LEV S. VYGOTSKY
Thought and Language
A thought embodied and embraced in fit words walks the earth a living being.
E. P. WHIPPLE
attributed, Day's Collacon