Thought Quotes

“Keep your heart clear
And transparent,
And you will
Never be bound.
A single disturbed thought
Creates ten thousand distractions.”
― Ryokan

“You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home -- all the more powerful because forbidden -- terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.”
― Winston S. Churchill, Blood, Sweat and Tears

“Honest self-reflection is true self-reflection.”
― Milan Kordestani, I'm Just Saying: A Guide to Maintaining Civil Discourse in an Increasingly Divided World

“Live to learn to love.
Learn to love to live.
Love to live to learn
so that you may live the life that you yearn.”
― Rico Dasheem

“To assess the quality of thoughts of people, don't listen to their words, but watch their actions.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“A genius is someone who takes a complex thing and makes it look simple. An academic does the opposite.”
― Robert Fanney

“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

“The Wrong we have Done, Thought, or Intended Will wreak its Vengeance on
Our SOULS.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“You will always be the answer, when somebody asks me what I'm thinking about.”
― Lisa Brooks

“If you put your hand into a fire, does anyone have to tell you to move it? Do you have to decide? No: When your hand starts to burn, it moves. You don’t have to direct it; the hand moves itself. In the same way, once you understand, through inquiry, that an untrue thought causes suffering, you move away from it.”
― Byron Katie, Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life

“Why did I come here? I thought. Why is it always only a matter of choosing between something bad and something worse?”
― Charles Bukowski

“The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays

“Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An 'instinct' in as unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man's desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love of life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer--and that is the way he has acted through most of history.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Tiny-perhaps." Rovender kept his eyes fixed on the rings. "Insignificant-never, Eva Nine. No living thing is insignificant.”
― Tony DiTerlizzi, The Search for WondLa

“Thought can never capture the movement of life, it is much too slow.”
― U.G. Krishnamurti, Mind is a Myth

“The deeper thought is, the taller it becomes.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun

“Why didn’t you dare it before? he asked harshly.
When I hadn’t a job? When I was starving? When I was just as I am now, as a man, as an artist, the same Martin Eden? That’s the question. I’ve been asking myself for many a day. My brain is the same old brain. And what is puzzling me is why they want me now. Surely they don’t want me for myself, for myself the same olf self they did not want. They must want me for something else, for something that is outside of me, for something that is not I. Shall I tell you what that something is? It is for the recognition I have recieved. That recognition is not I. Then again for the money I have earned and am earnin. But money is not I. And is it for the recognition and money, that you now want me?”
― Jack London, Мартин Иден

“We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Those who cannot attack the thought, instead attack the thinker.”
― Paul Valéry

“Don't keep forever on the public road,going only where others have gone, and following one after the other like a flock of sheep. Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. 'Every time you do so you will be certain to find something that you have never seen before. Of course it will be a little thing, but do not ignore it. Follow it up, explore all around it; one discovery will lead to another, and before you know it you will have something worth thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the results of thought.”
― Alexander Graham Bell

“A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“David Foster Wallace: Because I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them then.”
― David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“I was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness; it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“A tornado of thought is unleashed after each new insight. This in turn results in an earthquake of assumptions. These are natural disasters that re-shape the spirit.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“The cause of my profound sense of incompatibility with others is, I believe, that most people think with their feelings, whereas I feel with my thoughts.
For the ordinary man, to feel is to live, and to think is to know how to live. For me, to think is to live, and to feel is merely food for thought.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“…every feeling is the perception of a truth...”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding

“Always take all the time to reflect that circumstances permit, but when the time for action has come, stop thinking. (Andrew Jackson)”
― Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

“The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginitive in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.”
― Washington Irving, The Sketch Book