quotations about thought
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
What you are thinking about, you are becoming.
MUHAMMAD ALI
Esquire, February 2012
The great men of earth are the shadowy men, who, having lived and died, now live again and forever through their undying thoughts.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Every thought and feeling is a painting stroke, in the darkness, of our likeness that is to be; and our whole life is but a chamber, which we are frescoing with colors that do not appear while being laid on wet, but which will shine forth afterwards, when finished and dry.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
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
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
DOROTHY L. SAYERS
Gaudy Night
Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
DORIS LESSING
The Times, November 23, 2003
Thought consoles us for all, and heals all. If at times it does you ill, ask it for the remedy for that ill and it will give it to you.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living.
ANAIS NIN
diary, February 1932
My thoughts were like mercury--always shifting away before I could grab them or form them into a cohesive shape.
DAN SIMMONS
Endymion
Orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought; it learns not, neither can it forget.
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews
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
My thoughts and I were of another world.
BEN JONSON
Every Man Out of His Humour
Large elements in order brought,
And tracts of calm from tempest made,
And world-wide fluctuation sway'd,
In vassal tides that follow'd thought.
ALFRED TENNYSON
In Memoriam A.H.H.
One thought fills immensity.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Proverbs of Hell
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
The wish is often father to the thought.
JOHN SAUL
Black Lightning
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
All you really have to contribute is what you think.
BARRY DILLER
Playboy, July 1989
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