
Sometimes ascribed to Virginia Woolf, but it appeared as early as 1854 in Anna Jameson's A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories and Fancies, where it is ascribed to William Wordsworth.
Misattributed
1970s, You are the World (1972)
Context: Thought itself must deny itself. Thought itself sees what it is doing and therefore thought itself realizes that it has to come of itself to an end. There is no other factor than itself. Therefore when thought realizes that whatever it does, any movement that it makes, is disorder (we are taking that as an example) then there is silence.<!-- p. 135
Sometimes ascribed to Virginia Woolf, but it appeared as early as 1854 in Anna Jameson's A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories and Fancies, where it is ascribed to William Wordsworth.
Misattributed
Attributed by Anna Jameson in her A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories and Fancies (1854).
“Thought is saying no, and it is to itself that thought says no.”
Propos sur la religion [Remarks on religion] (1924)
Le Citoyen contre les Pouvoirs [The Citizen against the Powers] (1926)
Variant: To think is to say no.
Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics
Context: Awakening of Western thought will not be complete until that thought steps outside itself and comes to an understanding with the search for a world-view as this manifests itself in the thought of mankind as a whole. We have too long been occupied with the developing series of our own philosophical systems, and have taken no notice of the fact that there is a world-philosophy of which our Western philosophy is only a part. If, however, one conceives philosophy as being a struggle to reach a view of the world as a whole, and seeks out the elementary convictions which are to deepen it and give it a sure foundation, one cannot avoid setting our own thought face to face with that of the Hindus, and of the Chinese in the Far East. … Our Western philosophy, if judged by its own latest pronouncements, is much naiver than we admit to ourselves, and we fail to perceive this only because we have acquired the art of expressing what is simple in a pedantic way.
“A set is a Many that allows itself to be thought of as a One.”
As quoted in Infinity and the Mind (1995) by Rudy Rucker. ~ ISBN 0691001723
“Truly, thoughts are things, and their scope of operation is the world, itself.”
Source: Think and Grow Rich (1938), p. 87
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, comparing Spinoza's philosophy to that of the Eleatics, in Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1896), Vol. 3, Ch. I : The Metaphysics of the Understanding, § 2 : Spinoza, p. 257
“No thought, no reflection, no analysis, No cultivation, no intention; Let it settle itself.”
"Six Precepts" of Tilopa, quoted in Powell Zen and Reality (1975), p. 72
Source: A History of Economic Thought (1939), Chapter VII, The Transition, p. 357