quotations about thought
We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail. It is in the nature of things that we always fail, because we suddenly find it impossible to order our thoughts, because the process of thinking requires us to consider every thought there is, every possible thought. Fundamentally we have always failed, like all the others, whoever they were, even the greatest minds. At some point, they suddenly failed and their system collapsed, as is proved by their writings, which we admire because they venture farthest into failure. To think is to fail, I thought.
THOMAS BERNHARD
Extinction
Nothing is so fragile as thought in its infancy; an interruption breaks it: nothing is so powerful, even to overturning empires, when it reaches its maturity.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Great thoughts come from the heart.
LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES
Reflections and Maxims
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
The Stakes of Diplomacy
A person is limited only by the thoughts that he chooses.
JAMES ALLEN
As a Man Thinketh
Trying to write an inspiring memoir while repressing such thoroughly uninspiring thoughts is a path to madness.
RON CHARLES
"'Woman No. 17' a juice box of suburban satire", Denver Post, May 26, 2017
Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Locksley Hall
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
Words are but the shining garments of Thought.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Song of the Soul"
The world is your kaleidoscope, and the varying combinations of colours, which at every succeeding moment it presents to you are the exquisitely adjusted pictures of your ever-moving thoughts.
JAMES ALLEN
As a Man Thinketh
Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
A penny for your thought.
JOHN LYLY
Euphues
Our thoughts at least are ours.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
It Was an April Morning: Fresh and Clear
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
Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better than we are.
GEORGE ELIOT
Mr. Gilfil's Love Story
Two heads are better than one.
JOHN HEYWOOD
Proverbs
Never know whose thoughts you're chewing.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
Upon the cunning loom of thought
We weave our fancies, so and so.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
Cloth of Gold
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
If what we think now is different from what we thought then, we can take it for granted that what we think in a year will be different again.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta