Thought Quotes

“But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They're all in rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man's ideals, so therefore a religious experience just becomes a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry too, pretty soon. I just didn't want to get all wound up in any systems at all.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren

“Worry less about what other people think about you, and more about what you think about them.”
― Fay Weldon

“Life is difficult.”
― M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

“The only thing faster than the speed of thought is the speed of forgetfulness. Good thing we have other people to help us remember.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“Life is a movement, a constant movement in relationship; and thought, trying to capture that movement in terms of the past, as memory, is afraid of life.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Flight Of The Eagle

“With a philosophy education, one can infuriate his peers, intimidate his date, think of obscure, unreliable ways to make money, and never regret a thing.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“For God’s sake, let us be men
not monkeys minding machines
or sitting with our tails curled
while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.

Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Selected Letters

“The universe is full of men going through the same motions in the same surroundings, but carrying within themselves, and projecting around them, universes as mutually remote as the constellations.”
― Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism

“We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?”
― Updike, John, Rabbit, Run

“I think to think. Not to be thought-full, or to reach a point of wisdom or acquire a grace of knowledge. I think for the sensuality of thought.”
― Ilyas Kassam

“Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought; underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation.”
― Thomas Carlyle

“We have to cease to think, if we refuse to do it in the prison house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“The vivid force of his mind prevailed, and he fared forth far beyond the flaming ramparts of the heavens and traversed the boundless universe in thought and mind.”
― Lucretius

“Only those with tenacity can march forward in March”
― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

“True wit is nature to advantage dressed;
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.”
― Alexander Pope

“The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books 'any old time they have a mind to,' libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will, in fact, preserve that freedom which is a far more important part of our lives than any ideology or orthodoxy, the freedom that dissolves orthodoxies and inspires solutions to the ever-changing challenges of the future. I hope that your library and mine will continue in this way to be dangerous for many years to come.”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America

“Remembrance and reflection how allied!
What thin partitions Sense from Thought divide!”
― Alexander Pope, Essay on Man and Other Poems

“When the time is ripe for certain things, these things appear in different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring.”
― Farkas Bolyai

“There is much in this vision that will remind you of your mystics; yet between them and us there is far more difference than similarity, in respect both of the matter and the manner of our thought. For while they are confident that the cosmos is perfect, we are sure only that it is very beautiful. While they pass to their conclusion without the aid of intellect, we have used that staff every step of the way. Thus, even when in respect of conclusions we agree with your mystics rather than your plodding intellectuals, in respect of method we applaud most your intellectuals; for they scorned to deceive themselves with comfortable fantasies.”
― Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men

“Not even you can reach me here, Carmen thought.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

“As there can be no translation from one language into another which shall not scant the meaning somewhat, or enlarge upon it, so there is no language which can render thought without a jarring and a harshness somewhere.”
― Samuel Butler, Erewhon

“But I am a just man, even to my enemy—and I will acknowledge, beforehand, that they are cleverer brains than I thought them.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“This road will be new because you will see a given emotion as a choice rather than a condition of life.”
― Wayne W. Dyer, Your Erroneous Zones

“The latent abundance of your inner most resources matters less. What matter most is the impact you can make with your inner resources and the distinctive footprints you can leave with what is within you. The excuse not to dare is there for everybody. When you see so many people crowded at the entrance, think of the roofing and if the roofing is too high, think of the next door and if the next door is not penetrable, create a door within the wall.”
― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

“MAN is a slave only to his own mental lethargy.”
― Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems