quotations about thought
A thought is harmless unless we believe it.
BYRON KATIE
Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
The wish is often father to the thought.
JOHN SAUL
Black Lightning
If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.
ROALD DAHL
The Twits
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
Thought is required wherever a statement is proved, or, it may be, a general truth enunciated.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
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
I'll put that in my considering cap.
JOHN FLETCHER
The Loyal Subject
He who influences the thought of his times influences all the times that follow. He has made his impress on eternity.
ELBERT HUBBARD
The American Bible
Thought is what makes humans human ... It's the luminous spark of reason that grants us lordship over the animals, endows us with cell phones, and offers hope, even in our darkest hours, that our species will somehow calculate the way forward to a brighter tomorrow.
BRUNO MADDOX
Discover Magazine, May 2006
I hold it true that thoughts are things
Endowed with bodies, breath, and wings,
And that we send them forth to fill
The world with good results--or ill.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Secret Thoughts"
Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Dialectic of Enlightenment
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.
VICTOR HUGO
Les Misérables
I take it to be true that pure thought can grasp the real, as the ancients had dreamed.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Herbert Spencer lecture delivered at Oxford, June 10, 1933
In the union of noble thoughts and fair phrases the sons of God still marry the daughters of men.
HORACE SMITH
The Tin Trumpet: Or, Heads and Tails for the Wise and Waggish
Thought is power -- real, objective power. Moreover, the thoughts we create have a life of their own. They have a kind of material reality that affects other people for good or ill -- hence our responsibility to chose.
ANNIE BESANT
The Power of Thought
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
An artist carrying a thought from his mind into expression is like a child bearing a bucket brimming with water from the well to the house--part of the content is spilled.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.
KAHLIL GIBRAN
The Prophet
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. It sees man, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence; yet it bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were lord of the universe. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Why Men Fight: A Method of Abolishing the International Duel