quotations about thought
Beware of producing crude thoughts; study till thy words are matured.
PTAH HOTEP
attributed, Day's Collacon
Food for thought gives some folks indigestion.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
His high-erected thoughts look'd down upon
The smiling valley of his fruitful heart.
DANIEL WEBSTER
A Monumental Column
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
Orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought; it learns not, neither can it forget.
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews
The measure of greatness in a scientific idea is the extent to which it stimulates thought and opens up new lines of research.
PAUL ADRIAN MAURICE DIRAC
attributed, Cosmology of Lemaître
A penny for your thought.
JOHN LYLY
Euphues
Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Spectator, April 18, 1981
A thought by thought is piled, till some great truth
Is loosened, and the nations echo round,
Shaken to their roots, as do the mountains now.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Prometheus Unbound
What you are thinking about, you are becoming.
MUHAMMAD ALI
Esquire, February 2012
It is doubtful whether our present system of popular education does not retard independent or self thinking as much as it promotes it. All genuine education is self-education. It will incite the individual to think for himself, by rethinking what the race's great thinkers have already thought for him, thus enabling him to go ahead under his own mental steam.
JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON
The Field of Philosophy
Each flying thought, a flying thought pursues.
C. B. LANGSTON
"Thought"
A new thought belongs to the world, and is no man's patent.
HERBERT TUTTLE
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
My thoughts were like mercury--always shifting away before I could grab them or form them into a cohesive shape.
DAN SIMMONS
Endymion
Thought obeys no natural law. In a stream of water, time works the way it usually does in nature -- the future passes into the present and then into the past. In thought, the past might pour into the present and then drain away into the future. Or the future might rain into the past as the present disappears. Thought is not like a natural thing. Thought is literally the essence of the artificial.
MICHAEL W. CLUNE
"Thought Against Life: Cyrus Console's 'Romanian Notebook'", L.A. Review of Books, May 21, 2017
Thought is the wind, knowledge the sail, and mankind the vessel.
JULIUS CHARLES HARE
Guesses at Truth
Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose,
Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart
Made purple riot.
JOHN KEATS
"The Eve of Saint Agnes"
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
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