quotations about thought
To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.
HENRI POINCARÉ
Of Science and Hypotheses
Every thought willingly contemplated, ever word meaningly spoken, every action freely done, consolidates itself in the character, and will project itself onward in a permanent continuity.
HENRY GILES
attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers
If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.
ROALD DAHL
The Twits
God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"A Prayer for Old Age", A Full Moon in March
My Soul lives many lives.
Each life a thought, each thought a life.
I am but Thought.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Song of the Soul"
The untranslatable thought must be the most precise.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"After Long Silence"
The more we think, the more thought opens new worlds upon us.
ANEELA SHAHZAD
"Mind--The Hard Problem", Daily Pakistan, May 26, 2017
Our thoughts are heard in heaven.
EDWARD YOUNG
Night Thoughts
No amount of reading or memorizing will make you successful in life. It is the understanding and application of wise thought which counts.
BOB PROCTOR
You Were Born Rich
Just like gravity exists without a particle to carry it, the sublime thought is such that it reaches the farthest edges of the Universe with instant speed and communicates without contact.
ANEELA SHAHZAD
"Mind--The Hard Problem", Daily Pakistan, May 26, 2017
Whatsoe'er thy birth,
Thou wert a beautiful thought and softly bodied forth.
LORD BYRON
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Thought is something limitless and independent, and has been mixed with no thing but is alone by itself.... What was mingled with it would have prevented it from having power over anything in the way in which it does.... For it is the finest of all things and the purest.
ANAXAGORAS
fragment
Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts.
VOLTAIRE
Dialogue
Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
Social Studies
True it is, no doubt, in the order of abstract relationship, thought is the father of speech, and speech is the harbinger of deed; but this abstract fatherhood of thought is a thing in itself absolutely without reality; the mere thought of an orange, though entertained and cherished in the most capacious of fertile brains for infinite ages, will never produce an orange.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Natural History of Atheism
Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Sartor Resartus
For when a man placeth his thoughts without himself, he goeth not his own way.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Fortune", The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral
Good thoughts, though God accept them, yet towards men are little better than good dreams, except they be put in act.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
He who thinks little errs much.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
The native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pitch and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet