Quotes about thought
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“Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

“Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Source: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“You get more joy out of the giving to others, and should put a good deal of thought into the happiness you are able to give.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

As quoted in Sheroes: Bold, Brash, and Absolutely Unabashed Superwomen from Susan B. Anthony to Xena (1998) by Varla Ventura, p. 150

For Team, Wise, Happy, Relationship

“I should have learned this, she thought. I wanted to learn fire, and pain, but I should have learned people.”

Terry Pratchett book I Shall Wear Midnight

Source: I Shall Wear Midnight

Pain, People, Learning

“Think thoughts that make you happy. Do things that make you feel good. Be with people who make you feel good. Eat things that make your body feel good. Go at a pace that makes you feel good.”

Louise L. Hay book You Can Heal Your Life

Source: You Can Heal Your Life

People, Feeling, Thinking, Happiness

“Just when I thought my day couldnt get any worse, I saw the dead guy next to my locker.”

P. C. Cast (1960) American writer

Guy, Dead

“If I'm engrossed in a book, I have to rearrange my thoughts before I can mingle with other people, because otherwise they might think I was strange.”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

8 November 1943
Variant: If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl (1942 - 1944)

People, Books, Thinking

“All that a man achieves and all that he fails to achieve is the direct result of his own thoughts.”

James Allen book As a Man Thinketh

Source: As a Man Thinketh

“But you ain't part of it, are you?" said Granny conversationally. "You try, but you always find yourself watchin' yourself watchin' people, eh? Never quite believin' anything? Thinkin' the wrong thoughts?”

Terry Pratchett book Maskerade

Source: Maskerade

People, Parting

“There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write.”

William Makepeace Thackeray book The History of Henry Esmond

Bk. II, ch. 1.
The History of Henry Esmond (1852)
Source: The History of Henry Esmond, Esq.

Lying

“A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It's a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Presidency (1977–1981), 1977

Strong, Help, Personality

“I Know, I Alone

I know, I alone
How much it hurts, this heart
With no faith nor law
Nor melody nor thought.

Only I, only I
And none of this can I say
Because feeling is like the sky -
Seen, nothing in it to see.”

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher

Faith, Law, Feeling, Heart

“Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combatting the forces of evil… prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon…”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

alt.fan.pratchett (30 May 1998) http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.pratchett/msg/31c9fbae84e0fc8c <br class="br">Usenet

Death, Way, Evil

“I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!”

Jasper Fforde book Lost in a Good Book

Source: Lost in a Good Book

Hate, People, Reading, Personality

“I thought unicorns were more… Fluffy.”

Terry Pratchett book Lords and Ladies

Source: Lords and Ladies

“One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

Feeling, Time

“One ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strenth alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

W.E.B. Du Bois book The Souls of Black Folk

Source: The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. I: Of Our Spiritual Strivings
Context: After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

War, Feeling, Soul

“Thought is free.”

William Shakespeare The Tempest

Source: The Tempest

“You burn the paper, but not the words. You silence the words, but not the thoughts. You kill the thoughts only if you kill the man. And you will find that his thoughts rise again in the minds of others - twice as strong as before.”

Linda Sue Park book When My Name Was Keoko

Source: When My Name Was Keoko

Strong, Silence

“Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts or happenings. It consist mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever flowing through one's head.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Life

“No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

“Thoughts need words. Words need a voice.”

Sharon M. Draper book Out of My Mind

Source: Out of My Mind

“people who have no hold over their process of thinking ara likely to be ruined by liberty of thought.”

Muhammad Iqbál (1877–1938) Urdu poet and leader of the Pakistan Movement

People, Thinking

“You are today where your thoughts have brought you;
you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.”

James Allen (1864–1912) British philosophical writer

Good Morning

“Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

“The thing about God, she thought, is that He usually does help, but not until you've made an effort on your own.”

Tove Jansson book The Summer Book

Source: The Summer Book

God, Effort, Help

“I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 7

Happiness

“Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.”

René Descartes (1596–1650) French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist

“By space the universe encompasses me and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

World, Universe

“so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again…”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

Tattoo, Parting

“I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

Error, Time

“The Highest Thought is always that thought which contains joy. The Clearest Words are those words which contain truth. The Grandest Feeling is that feeling which you call love.”

Neale Donald Walsch (1943) American writer

Love, Truth, Feeling, Joy

“I learned to create a little more space between my thoughts and actions—actually between my feelings and reactions. This is extremely important; without it, life can be a real roller coaster ride.”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Source: Midnights with the Mystic

Life, Feeling, Learning

“Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: DId you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.
Ophelia: What is, my lord?
Hamlet: Nothing.”

William Shakespeare Hamlet

Source: Hamlet

Lie, Thinking, Country

“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

Soul

“I'm sorry," she said humbly. "I haven't wanted to lie to you."
"I should hope so. You're the worst liar I've ever met." He thought about it for a moment, then added, "--or the best. Now I'm all confused.”

Tamora Pierce book Alanna: The First Adventure

Source: Alanna: The First Adventure

Lie, Hope

“She laughed and danced with the thought of death in her heart.”

Hans Christian Andersen book The Little Mermaid

Source: The Little Mermaid

Death, Heart, Dance

“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.”

Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow

Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Intelligence

“I've always thought that anyone who needs to join a herd so badly must be a bit of a sheep himself.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Prisoner of Heaven

Source: The Prisoner of Heaven

“Our thoughts are clay, they are moulded with the changes of the days;--when we are resting they are good; under fire, they are dead. Fields of craters within and without.”

Erich Maria Remarque book All Quiet on the Western Front

Source: All Quiet on the Western Front

Change, Dead

“Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

“Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

Men, Freedom, Science

“There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself. I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

Love, Religion, Drawing

“Women were complicated creatures. Any man who thought he had one figured out simply wasn’t paying attention”

Eileen Wilks Mortal Danger

Source: Mortal Danger

Women

“We who live in quiet places have the opportunity to become acquainted with ourselves, to think our own thoughts and live our own lives in a way that is not possible for those keeping up with the crowd.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957) American children's writer, diarist, and journalist

Way, Thinking

“In my experience, we don't make thoughts appear, they just appear. One day, I noticed that their appearance just wasn't personal. Noticing that really makes it simpler to inquire.”

Byron Katie (1942) American spiritual writer

Source: Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life

Appearance, Personality

“I thought it was keep your friends close so you have someone to drive the car when you sneak over to your enemy's house at night and throw up in his mailbox,"
-Jace”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Source: City of Fallen Angels

Cars, Housing, Night

“Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Beauty

“Man is made or unmade by himself. By the right choice he ascends. As a being of power, intelligence, and love, and the lord of his own thoughts, he holds the key to every situation…”

James Allen (1864–1912) British philosophical writer

Love, Intelligence

“Falling hard for somebody makes you do things you never thought you'd do before. Like pulling off an A in History or finally facing the truth about yourself”

Steve Kluger book Almost Like Being in Love

Source: Almost Like Being in Love

Truth, History

“About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

Water

“Whoever thought that he had understood something of me had merely construed something out of me, after his own image.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

“Thoughts are free and subject to no rule. On them rests the freedom of man, and they tower above the light of nature… create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy from which new arts flow.”

Paracelsus (1493–1541) Swiss physician and alchemist

Art, Nature, Freedom, Light

“Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

Source: A Death in the Desert (1864), Line 59.
Source: Dramatic Lyrics

“What a terrible mistake, thought Drogo, perhaps everything is like that — we think there are beings like ourselves around us and instead there is nothing but ice and stones speaking a strange language; we are on the point of greeting a friend but our arm falls inert, the smile dies away because we are completely alone.”

Dino Buzzati book The Tartar Steppe

Source: The Tartar Steppe

Smile, Thinking

“Quite, quite,' she thought with a little sigh. 'It's always like this in their adventures. To save and be saved. I wish somebody would write a story sometime about the people who warm up the heroes afterward.”

Tove Jansson book Moominland Midwinter

Source: Moominland Midwinter

People

“It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever, he said. Have you thought of going into teaching?”

Terry Pratchett book Mort

Source: Mort

“It was much pleasanter at home," thought poor Alice, "when one wasn't always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I almost wish I hadn't gone down the rabbit-hole--and yet--and yet--…”

Lewis Carroll book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Source: Alice in Wonderland

Home

“The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

The universe is flux, life is opinion.
The universe is transformation: life is opinion. (Long translation)
ὁ κόσμος ἀλλοίωσις, ὁ βίος ὑπόληψις.
IV, 3
Variant: Our life is what our thoughts make it.
Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IV

Cute, Life, Universe, Change

“Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Bird, Laughter, Flying

“The mission of law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even thought the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its mission is to protect property.”

Frédéric Bastiat book The Law

Source: The Law

Law, Personality

“There are moments when one can neither think nor feel, she thought, and if one can neithre feel nor think, where's one?”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Feeling, Thinking

“It’s strange,” Moominmamma thought. “Strange that people can be sad, and even angry because life is too easy. But that’s the way it is, I suppose. The only thing to do is to start life afresh.”

Tove Jansson book Moominpappa at Sea

Source: Moominpappa at Sea

Life, People, Sadness, Way

“Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.”

Orhan Pamuk (1952) Turkish novelist, screenwriter, and Nobel Prize in Literature recipient

Source: My Name is Red

Music, Silence, Painting

“One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.”

Saul Bellow book Herzog

Source: Herzog

“He thought about how it might be to be, say, a fox confronted with an angry sheep. A sheep moreover, that could afford to employ wolves.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Source: The Color of Magic

“Everybody was patting Nico on the back, complimenting him on his fighting. Even the Ares kids thought he was pretty cool. Hey, show up with an army of undead warriors to save the day, and suddenly you're everybody's best friend.”

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Source: The Last Olympian

Fight

“Going into our fear and confronting our greed, our weaknesses, our neediness is the way out. And the way out is through the mind, by choosing our thoughts.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki book Rich Dad Poor Dad

Source: Rich Dad, Poor Dad

Fear, Way

“I wondered what I thought I was burying.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“First Sight means you can see what really is there, and Second Thoughts mean thinking about what you are thinking. And in Tiffany's case, there were sometimes Third Thoughts and Fourth Thoughts although these… sometimes led her to walk into doors.”

Terry Pratchett book I Shall Wear Midnight

Source: I Shall Wear Midnight

Thinking

“So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

Marriage, Girl

“Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.”

Stephen King book It

Variant: And almost idly, in a kind of sidethought, Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.
Source: It (1986)

Truth, Childhood

“Drag your thoughts away
from your troubles…
by the ears, by the heels,
or any other way you can manage it.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Way

“This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

World, Hope, Music, Way

“Do you know, I always thought unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!"

Well, now that we have seen each other," said the unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you.”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Source: Alice's Adventures In Wonderland And Through The Looking Glass

“Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.”

Sharon Creech book Absolutely Normal Chaos

Source: Absolutely Normal Chaos

Sadness, Feeling, Boy, Waiting

“Women are the only people I am afraid of who I never thought would hurt me”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Variant: A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.

Women, People, Hurt

“She'd thought love had something to do with happiness, but it turned out they were not even vaguely related. Love was closer to a need, no different from the need to eat, to breathe.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

Source: NOS4A2

Love, Happiness

“I'd be more willing to accept religion, even if I didn't believe it, if I thought it made people nicer to each other but I don't think it does.”

Andy Rooney (1919–2011) writer, humorist, television personality

Source: Sincerely, Andy Rooney

People, Religion, Thinking

“Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

Love, Feeling, Lovers

“A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

“I thought I'd lie on the floor and writhe in pain for awhile. It relaxes me.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Jace to Alec, pg. 318
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)

Pain, Lie

“Don't want to be near you for the thoughts we share but the words we never have to speak.”

Nikki Giovanni (1943) American writer and academic

“Let my thoughts come to you, when I am gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin of starry silence.”

Rabindranath Tagore Stray Birds

Source: Stray Birds

Silence

“Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.”

Douglas Adams (1952–2001) English writer and humorist

Source: The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

For Men, God

“He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

Beauty, Dreams

“Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.”

Emile Zola book Germinal

Source: Germinal

“Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.”

Carol Shields (1935–2003) American author

Source: The Republic of Love

Books, Reading

“I want it said of me by those who knew me best that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Recalled in a letter from Joshua Speed in Herndon's Lincoln (1890), p. 527 http://books.google.com/books?id=rywOAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA527&dq=%22plucked+a+thistle+and+planted+a+flower%22 <br class="br">Posthumous attributions

Flowers

“Nature is not primarily functional. It is primarily beautiful. Stop for a moment and let that sink in. We’re so used to evaluating everything (and everyone) by their usefulness that this thought will take a minute or two to begin to dawn on us. Nature is not primarily functional. It is primarily beautiful. Which is to say, beauty is in and of itself a great and glorious good, something we need in large and daily doses.”

Stasi Eldredge

Source: Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman's Soul

Beauty, Nature