Quotes about thought (9954 quotes, page 56)

“You are about to be told one more time that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources?! Have you seen a strip mine? Have you seen a clear cut in the forest? Have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource! They're going to strip mine your soul. They're going to clear cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist, because the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked!”

Utah Phillips (1935–2008) American labor organizer, folk singer, storyteller and poet

The Past Didn't Go Anywhere, Righteous Babe Records (1996)

Soul , Nature , Learning , Time

“The conduct of the white strangers it was that caused him the greatest perturbation. He puckered his brows into a frown of deep thought. It was well, thought he, that he had not given way to his first impulse to rush forward and greet these white men as brothers.
They were evidently no different from the black men — no more civilized than the apes — no less cruel than Sabor.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 13 : His Own Kind

Men , Way

“I knew that my staying up would not change the election result if I were defeated, while if elected I had a hard day ahead of me. So I thought a night's rest was best in any event.”

Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901) American politician, 23rd President of the United States (in office from 1889 to 1893)

As quoted in A Call to America : Inspiring and Empowering Quotations from the 43 presidents of the United States (2002) by Bryan Curtis

Change , Night

“Each thought himself, especially since this last promotion, to be indispensably necessary to the formation of London society, and was comfortable in the conviction that he had thoroughly succeeded in life by acquiring the privilege of sitting down to dinner three times a week with peers and peeresses.”

Anthony Trollope book The Prime Minister

Source: The Prime Minister (1876), Ch. 20

Life , Time

“They looked like men. That was the trouble with devils, Carolyn thought. Too often they looked like men.”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Source: Gibbon's Decline & Fall (1996), Chapter 20 (p. 449)

Men

“(Recalling her conversation with Anna Nicole Smith eating lunch) All of a sudden, she takes a bite of something and she goes like this (makes a disgusted face) "I don't lahk it." I go, "What's the matter, honey?" and she goes "I don't lahk it. I thought it was mashed pataters." PA-TAY-TERS! I heard it with my own ears. PATATERS. Britney probably wants to marry her now. So, anyway, I looked on her plate and said, "No, it's polenta" and, I swear to God, she looks at me and goes "Pimento?" I said, "No, that's an olive. "Polenta"”

Kathy Griffin (1960) American actress and comedian

it's like mushed-up cornmeal." She goes, "I don't lahk it. I thought..." Mashed pateters, I got it.
The D-list (2004)

God

“To tell the truth, I often felt uneasy when I thought of the excessive brittleness and fragility of the moon. The moon is generally repaired in Hamburg, and very imperfectly. It is done by a lame cooper, an obvious blockhead who has no idea how to do it. He took waxed thread and olive-oil—hence that pungent smell over all the earth which compels people to hold their noses. And this makes the moon so fragile that no men can live on it, but only noses. Therefore we cannot see our noses, because they are on the moon.”

Nikolai Gogol book Diary of a Madman

Diary of a Madman (1835)

Men , People , Truth , Idea

“I thought a lot about our Nation and what I should do as President. And Sunday night before last, I made a speech about two problems of our country — energy and malaise.”

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

Remarks at a town meeting, Bardstown, Kentucky (31 July 1979), referring to his The Crisis of Confidence address (he did not actually use the word "malaise" in that earlier speech), Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter, 1979, Book 2, p. 1340
Presidency (1977–1981), 1978

Problem , Night , Country

“The greatest work of the composer is often sublimation, that is, the deflection of energies, thoughts, occurrences, psychological and physical reactions, into socially constructive or creative channels.”

Marion Bauer (1882–1955) American composer

Hisama, Ellie M. (2001). Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon, p.122. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 052164030X.

“Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Books

Wisdom , Men , Age , Learning

“The Gospels were not thought of as works of literature. People were not concerned with the literary reputation of Matthew or Mark, but with the substance of their records of our Lord's life. They did not have to respect their actual words, as they would if they were transcribing the works of Thucydides or Plato.”

Frederic G. Kenyon (1863–1952) British palaeographer and biblical and classical scholar

Source: The Story Of The Bible, Chapter X, The Position Today, p. 135

Life , People , Literature

“I had to show that the Bible dealt with an encounter between God and Man. I thought only of the apartness of God. What I had to learn after that was the togetherness of Man and God — a union of two totally different kinds of beings.”

Karl Barth (1886–1968) Swiss Protestant theologian

On his Epistle to the Romans (1918; 1921).
"Witness to an Ancient Truth" (1962)

God , Learning

“The gold rush changed California, it changed the whole west, and it changed America's sense of itself because for the first time the United States of America, in the minds of the American people, fulfilled the dream of Jefferson, which was a continental nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific. No one thought about America stretching from Chesapeake Bay to San Francisco Bay until fathers and sons and uncles and brothers and fiances were out there.”

J. S. Holliday (1924–2006) American historian

The West (1996)

People , Dreams , Sense , Change

“Yes, [I spent] two long years, traveling all over the United States, all over Europe, interviewing many, many, many people who had been thrown out of their academic jobs because they taught that there was a possibility of life coming from something other than Darwinism, who thought that possibly random selection and mutations didn't account for the universe, didn't account for gravity, didn't account for why nobody had ever seen an individual species evolve -- no one's ever seen an individual species evolve!”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

YouTube -- Ben Stein discusses the "Expelled" documentary, Fox News: Intelligent Journey -- Stein's New Documentary, 14 April 2008, 2008-04-23 http://youtube.com/watch?v=ck3AgSAXIgo,

Life , People , Travel , Universe

“[I] never thought too highly of anyone foolish enough to take on the nickname of a life-destroying dope product and promote such family-destroying conduct on stage.”

Ted Nugent (1948) American rock musician

Regarding Dimebag Darrell
Postings on Pantera (2006)

Life , Family

“I don’t really remember writing it [The Day I Tried To Live]. I vaguely remember the verse. It was based on a tuning that Ben Shepherd had came up with. Lyrically, it was one of those songs that I thought everyone could connect with. ‘Fell On Black Days’ is maybe a sister song to it. It’s this feeling that could come over anyone, and has probably happened to everyone. ‘Fell On Black Days’ is the feeling of waking up one day and realizing you’re not happy with your life. Nothing happened, there was no emergency, no accident, you don’t know what happened. You were happy, and one day you just aren’t, and you have to try to figure that out.
With ‘The Day I Tried To Live,’ the attitude I was trying to convey was that thing that I think everyone goes through where you wake up in the morning and you just don’t know how you are going to get through the day, and you kind of just talk yourself into it. You may go through different moments of hopelessness and wanting to give up, or wanting to just get back into bed and say f— it, but you convince yourself you’re going to do it again. And maybe this is the last time you’re going to do it, but it’s once more around.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Interview with Entertainment Weekly, June 3, 2014 http://ew.com/article/2014/06/03/soundgarden-superunknown-spoonman-black-hole-sun-stories/,
On depression and suicide

Life , Feeling , Thinking , Sister

“The child is a realist in every domain of thought, and it is therefore natural that in the moral sphere he should lay more stress on the external, tangible element than on the hidden motive.”

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) Swiss psychologist, biologist, logician, philosopher & academic

Source: The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932), Ch. 2 : Adult Constraint and Moral Realism

Motivation , Nature

“If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!”

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) novelist

Source: The History of Pendennis (1848-1850), Ch. 42.

Secret , Books , History

“It is with logic as it is with other sciences. They draw wisdom from the mysterious source of plain experience. Agriculture, e. g., aims to teach the farmer how to cultivate the soil; but fields were tilled long before any agricultural college had begun its lectures. In the same way human beings think without ever having heard of logic. But by practice they improve their innate faculty of thought, they make progress, they gradually learn to make better use of it. Finally, just as the farmer arrives at the science of agriculture, so the thinker arrives at logic, acquires a clear consciousness of his faculty of thought and a professional dexterity in applying it.”

Joseph Dietzgen (1828–1888) german philosopher

Letter 2
Letters on Logic: Especially Democratic-Proletarian Logic (1906)

Wisdom , Way , Thinking , Learning

“We didn't know Jackie O
She was one of the people that we did not know
Nor did we care about her hair,
Her pillbox hat or her savoir faire.
But still we thought we knew
Maybe you did too
River Phoenix
River Phoenix
Ian curtis
and River Phoenix and me and you”

River Phoenix (1970–1993) American actor, musician, and activist

River Phoenix by Nada Surf

People

“The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought.”

Thomas Beecham (1879–1961) British conductor and impresario

Quoted in Atkins and Newman, Beecham Stories, 1978

Music

“You protect the ones you love. He clung to the thought. Even if they ignorantly resent you for it.”

Tim Powers (1952) American writer

A Time To Cast Away Stones (p. 126)
Short fiction, The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (2011)

Love

“And thus daily, and month by month, and year by year, he will work at his mind, training it in these consecutive habits of thought, and he will learn to choose that of which he thinks; he will no longer allow thoughts to come and go; he will no longer permit a thought to grip him and hold him; he will no longer let a thought come into the mind and fix itself there and decline to be evicted; he will be master within his own house… he will say: “No; no such anxiety shall remain within my mind; no such thought shall have shelter within my mind; within this mind nothing stays that is not there by my choice and my invitation, and that which comes uninvited shall be turned outside the limits of my mind.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Source: https://theosophy.world/sites/default/files/ebooks/Annie%20Besant-In-The-Outer-Court.pdf In the Outer Court, 1895, p. 60

Thinking , Learning , Housing , Training

“The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”

Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 42

Death , Art , Soul , Idea

“Their choice of material was always very much to do with what they were thinking as architecture students. Rather unexciting people, I would've thought, primarily. I mean, anybody walking into an art school like that would've been tricked--maybe they were working their entry into an art school.”

Syd Barrett (1946–2006) English musician

Syd Barrett interview in Melody Maker, 1971-03-27

People , School , Art , Thinking

“I was opposed to us going to Iraq from the very beginning. I really thought that there was no threat to our national security, I really thought that if we went into Iraq we would find ourselves in a civil war to which there would be no end, and I thought we had the military surveillance capability to see Iraq roll out any weapons of mass destruction and if they had done that we could have gone in and dealt with that. Afghanistan, originally, I was completely supportive of that. We were attacked, we attacked back. That's what our military is for and after about six months I think we had pretty effectively taken care of al Qaeda. But that was ten years ago! We're building roads, schools, bridges, and highways in Iraq and Afghanistan and we're borrowing forty-three cents out of every dollar to do that. In my opinion, this is crazy. And in looking at Libya right now… my opinion is I'm opposed to it A through Z.”

Gary Johnson (1953) American politician, businessman, and 29th Governor of New Mexico

Statement at FOX News Debate
YouTube
2011-05-05
http://youtu.be/QRPrZxHUqsA
2012-02-24
Foreign Policy

War , School , Support , Thinking

“We thought: we're poor, we have nothing,
but when we started losing one after the other
so each day became
remembrance day,
we started composing poems
about God's great generosity
and — our former riches.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

"We thought: we're poor"
We thought we were beggars, we thought we had nothing at all
But then when we started to lose one thing after another,
Each day became
A memorial day -
And then we made songs
Of great divine generosity
And of our former riches.
Translated by Ilya Shambat (2001)
White Flock (1917)

God

“Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do so you will find something you have never seen before. Follow it up, explore around it, and before you know it, you will have something to think about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the result of thought.”

Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) scientist and inventor known for his work on the telephone

Engraving at Bell Labs as quoted in Comprehending and Decoding the Cosmos: Discovering Solutions to Over a Dozen Cosmic Mysteries by Jerome Drexler (2006). p. viii.
Disputed

Thinking , Time

“Because he did not care about his country, Lenin was prepared to promise everybody whatever they wanted without giving much thought to the future. The peasants wanted private land for their communes? Let them take it: eventually all the land will be confiscated and collectivized anyway. Until then, ‘looting the loot’ will win over, or at least neutralize, the peasantry. The workers demand to run the factories? Even though ‘workers’ control is a detestable syndico-anarchist slogan, there is no harm in granting their desires—for the time being. Once industries have been nationalized and subjected to general economic plan of production, ‘workers’ control’ will vanish of itself.”

Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

Source: Three “Whys” of the Russian Revolution (1995), p. 44

Communication , Time , Future , Country

“All old Poems, Homer's and the rest, are authentically Songs. I would say, in strictness, that all right Poems are; that whatsoever is not sung is properly no Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling lines,—to the great injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most part! What we wants to get at is the thought the man had, if he had any: why should he twist it into jingle, if he could speak it out plainly? It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true passion of melody, and the very tones of him, according to Coleridge's remark, become musical by the greatness, depth and music of his thoughts, that we can give him right to rhyme and sing; that we call him a Poet, and listen to him as the Heroic of Speakers,—whose speech is Song.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Poet

Music , Passion , Singing , Heart

“I have people constantly come up to me telling me that I have written their life. When I wrote the story I thought it was a pretty good story but I had no idea that many people felt like that.”

Blackie Lawless (1956) musician, songwriter and actor

Music America Interview

Life , People , Idea

“All that is thought should not be said, all that is said should not be written, all that is written should not be published, and all that is published should not be read.”

Menachem Mendel of Kotzk (1787–1859) Polish rabbi

As quoted in Triumph of Survival : The Story of the Jews in the Modern Era 1650-1995‎ (1993) by Berel Wein, p. 96

Reading

“The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts, but that it generates a way of thinking.”

Samuel R. Delany book Triton

Appendix B (p. 363)
Triton (1976)

Way , Thinking

“The category “society” itself expressed the acute conflict between the social and political sphere—society as antagonistic to the state. Similarly, “individual,” “class,” “private,” “family” denoted spheres and forces not yet integrated with the established conditions—spheres of tension and contradiction. With the growing integration of industrial society, these categories are losing their critical connotation, and tend to become descriptive, deceptive, or operational terms. An attempt to recapture the critical intent of these categories, and to understand how the intent was cancelled by the social reality, appears from the outset to be regression from a theory joined with historical practice to abstract, speculative thought: from the critique of political economy to philosophy. This ideological character of the critique results from the fact that the analysis is forced to proceed from a position “outside” the positive as well as negative, the productive as well as destructive tendencies in society.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. xlvi

Family , Understanding , Reality , Appearance

“Mitt did not quite forget his perfect land. He remembered it, though a little fuzzily, next time the wind dropped, but he did not set off to look for it again. It was plain to him that soldiers only brought you back again if you went. It made him sad. When an inkling of it came to him in silence, or in scents, or, later, if the wind hummed a certain note, or a storm came shouting in from the sea and he caught the same note in the midst of its noise, he thought of his lost perfect place and felt for a moment as if his heart would break.”

Diana Wynne Jones (1934–2011) English children's fantasy writer

Source: Dalemark Quartet, Drowned Ammet (1977), p. 233.

Sadness , Silence , Time , Heart

“If there were gold medals for taking drugs for England then I’d have won a shitload! I did enjoy it but it kind of got to the point where I’d done them all and that was it, there was none left and I just thought 'Can’t be arsed any more.”

Noel Gallagher (1967) British musician

Noel Gallagher cited in " Gallagher speaks about drug experiences http://www.digitalspy.com/article/ds39948.html" at digitalspy.com, 25 November 2006
Controversy with other artists

“"Bring forth the horse!" — the horse was brought;
In truth, he was a noble steed,
A Tartar of the Ukraine breed,
Who look'd as though the speed of thought
Were in his limbs.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Mazeppa http://readytogoebooks.com/MZP21.htm (1819), stanza 9.

Truth , Horse , Speed

“You have drunk deep at the springs of western knowledge. While you will not hesitate to absorb for your benefit and for the national good the best elements in western culture and thought, you will not in any case permit the destruction of the vital elements of your own civilisation.”

Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–1953) Indian politician

Speech delivered at Bombay University Convocation on 17th August 1937.

Spring , Knowledge

“Until I was 25, 1 had one tooth missing. When George Ogilvie cast me, he asked me about it, and I told him the story and that I thought it was very false of me to go and get a tooth cap. He was very nice about it, listened to it all, and said, "All right, well, let me put it this way, Russell. You're playing the lead character in my film, right? The character of Johnny has two front teeth….'”

Russell Crowe (1964) New Zealand-born Australian actor, film producer and musician

GQ Interview (2005)

Way , Falseness

“As I flew over the Shahyad monument, I saw that one corner was completely dark. A moment later I realized this black mass was a mass of Iranian women, women who had achieved one of the highest levels of emancipation in the Middle East. Here they were in the mournful black chador their grandmother had worn. My god, I thought, is this how it ends?”

Ashraf Pahlavi (1919–2016) Iranian royal

In a memoir, Faces in a Mirror, p. 205 (1981)

Women , God

“Akira Toriyama: That's a tough question. I thought of Piccolo first, and I wanted to draw him as a scary character, and it was only afterwards that I had to come up with a species. Since they have antennae, I thought they looked like slugs. So "Namekian" is a play on words, but I didn't think too deeply about it. I don't think they're plants, but they may be hermaphrodites.”

Akira Toriyama (1955) manga artist and video game character designer

"Shonen Jump interviews Akira Toriyama http://www.gamespot.com/pages/unions/read_article.php?topic_id=24686028&union_id=3216
Interview with Shōnen Jump

Question , Thinking , Drawing

“You are very kind in planning presents for me to make, and my mother has shown me exactly the same attention; but as I do not choose to have generosity dictated to me, I shall not resolve on giving my cabinet to Anna till the first thought of it has been my own.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to Cassandra (1801-01-08) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“We have reached the age, those of us to whom fortune has assigned a post in life's struggle, when, beaten and smashed and biffed by the lashings of the dragon's tail, we begin to appreciate that the old man was not such a damned fool after all. We saw our parents wrestling with that same dragon, and we thought, though we never spoke the thought aloud, 'Why don't he hit him on the head?' Alas, comrades, we know now. We have hit the dragon on the head and we have seen the dragon smile.”

Ernest Thayer (1863–1940) American poet

Spoken at Thayer's tenth anniversary reunion at Harvard, 1895, as quoted in "American Heritage," (December 1968).

Life , Age , Smile , Fools

“Lincoln is, both culturally and in terms of his economic thinking, firmly and immovably located in the center of what we can call liberal democratic thought in the 19th century. He is very much market oriented, with tremendous confidence in the power of a capitalist society to transform for the better, and he believes in opening the possibilities of that society to as many as possible. To him, that’s what’s coterminous with liberty.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

Confidence , Thinking

“Thoughts about the art of portraiture. Some will not recognize the truthfulness of my mirror. Let them remember that I am not here to reflect the surface (this can be done by the photographic plate), but must penetrate inside. My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Diary entry (1901), # 136, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918; University of California Press, 1964
1895 - 1902

Truth , Art , Heart

“[about Ad Reinhardt:].. we supported each other... He thought I was a good painter, and I thought he was a good painter.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

1980 - 2000, Perfection Is in the Mind', 1995

Support

“There’s no forgiveness built into the system. I told Barbara so, dozens of times. She was always marching off to save the whales, save the trees, save some goddamn thing. It was endearing. But in the back of my head I always heard Dad’s voice: ‘This is only a holding action. Nothing is ever really saved.’ Barbara thought the greenhouse effect was like a virus, something you could stop if you came up with the right vaccine. I told her it was a cancer—the cancer of humanity on the vital organs of the earth. You can’t stop that by marching.”
“Isn’t that a little like giving up?”
“I think it’s called acceptance.”
Archer stood and walked to the door, where his silhouette obscured the motion of the trees.
“Very bleak attitude, Tom.”

Robert Charles Wilson book A Bridge of Years

“Experience bears it out.”
Source: A Bridge of Years (1991), Chapter 3 (pp. 52-53)

Forgiveness , Thinking , Tree , Time

“All these words we use, anybody can be a genius now. It used to be you had to have a thought no one ever had before or you had to invent a number. Now, it’s like, “Hey, I’ve got a cup in case we need another cup.””

Louis C.K. (1967) American comedian and actor

“Dude, you’re a genius!
http://splitsider.com/2013/02/the-annotated-wisdom-of-louis-c-k/

“I thought about reaching out with my authorial hand and snatching her from that awful situation. I thought about it and I agonized over it. But to me, that felt dishonest and emotionally manipulative. This was the end she had chosen, and I felt she had earned an ending that was as powerful as she was.”

Veronica Roth (1988) American author

About the End of Allegiant (SPOILERS), Roth, Veronica, Veronica Roth, October 28, 2013, November 3, 2013 http://veronicarothbooks.blogspot.com/2013/10/about-end-of-allegiant-spoilers.html,

“Research is something that everyone can do, and everyone ought to do. It is simply collecting information and thinking systematically about it. The word ‘research’ carries overtones of abstruse statistics and complex methods, white coats and computers. Some social research is highly specialised but most is not; much of the best research is logically very straightforward. Useful research on many problems can be done with small resources, and should be a regular part of the life of any thoughtful person involved in social action.”

Raewyn Connell (1944) Australian sociologist

Raewyn Connell et al. (1975). How to do small surveys – a guide for students in sociology, kindred industries and allied trades. School of Social Sciences. Flinders University. p. 1.

Life , Problem , Thinking , Parting

“Music allows a person to express their deepest thoughts, thoughts that cannot be expressed with just words. I am often asked how I begin a song or develop a melody from nothing. That is the spiritual aspect of creating. Finding something deep within yourself that can only be created by you.”

Bradley Joseph (1965) Composer, pianist, keyboardist, arranger, producer, recording artist

Interview with Bradley Joseph, The Spiritual Significance Of Music, World Edition http://www.xtrememusic.org/world/joseph_bradley.pdf http://www.xtrememusic.org/new.html (from extrememusic.org) http://xtrememusic.org/world.html

Music , Personality

“For Stirner, the social axiom of conservative, liberal, and socialist schools of political thought alike is in itself repressive: it disguises as potentially redemptive an order whose central function is inhibitory of the individual’s interests.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 55

School

“I’ll have to learn to snowshoe. I had my first lesson this morning and cut a ludicrous figure. I’ll be virtually a prisoner until I learn my way around. But any price is worth paying to get away from the thought-destroying din and soul-killing routine of the city!”

Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction

“Diary in the Snow” (p. 203); originally published in the first edition of Night's Black Agents (1947)
Short Fiction, Night's Black Agents (1947)

Way , Soul , Learning

“Organizations play a leading role in our modern world. Their presence affects - some would insist that the proper term us infects - virtually every sector of contemporary social life. This book is about organizations – what they are and what they do, how they have changed, and how people have thought about them and studied them.”

W. Richard Scott (1932) American sociologist

Source: Organizations and organizing, 2007, p. 1

Life , People , Books , World

“We can see that in putting the question "what is man?" what we mean is: what can man become? That is, can man dominate his own destiny, can he "make himself," can he create his own life? We maintain therefore that man is a process and, more exactly, the process of his actions. If you think about it, the question itself "what is man?" is not an abstract or "objective" question. It is born of our reflection about ourselves and about others, and we want to know, in relation to what we have thought and seen, what we are and what we can become; whether we really are, and if so to what extent, "makers of our own selves," of our life and of our destiny. And we want to know this "today," in the given conditions of today, the conditions of our daily life, not of any life or any man”

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) Italian writer, politician, theorist, sociologist and linguist

Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971).

Life , Question , Thinking

“It was thought that he had genius, if only because he had been able to delegate his duties in so intricate a way that there was never any need for him to do anything at all. His signature, which was necessary from time to time at the end of long notices which no one read, was always faked, and even the ingenious system of delegation whereon his greatness rested was itself worked out by another.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 11 (p. 440)

Way , Time , Reading

“Is there a thinker apart from thought?”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

12th Public Talk, London, UK (28 May 1961)
1960s

“Somebody asked me what I thought next generation meant and what about the PlayStation 3 was next generation. The only next gen system I've seen is the Wii - the PS3 and the Xbox 360 feel like better versions of the last, but pretty much the same game with incremental improvement.”

Will Wright (1960) American video game designer and entrepreneur

Source: Guardian Unlimited http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=174502

Feeling , Game

“A community which is inspired by feelings of ill-will towards other communities is low and ignoble. I entertain the highest respect for the customs, laws, religious and social institutions of other communities. Nay, it is my duty, according to the teaching of the Quran, even to defend their places of worship, if need be. Yet I love the communal group which is the source of my life and behaviour; and which has formed me what I am by giving me its religion, its literature, its thought, its culture, and thereby recreating its whole past as a living operative factor, in my present consciousness.”

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

Sir Muhammad Iqbal’s 1930 Presidential Address to the 25th Session of the All-India Muslim League, Allahabad, 29 December 1930 (from University of Columbia website http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_iqbal_1930.html)

Love , Life , Religion , Law

“Somebody who reads only newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors appears to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. And what a person thinks on his own, without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of other people, is, similarly, even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Einer, der nur Zeitungen liest und, wenn's hochkommt, Bücher zeitgenössischer Autoren, kommt mir vor wie ein hochgradig Kurzsichtiger, der es verschmäht, Augengläser zu tragen. Er ist völlig abhängig von den vorurteilen und Moden seiner Zeit, denn er bekommt nichts anderes zu sehen und zu hören. Und was einer selbständig denkt ohne Anlehnung an das Denken und Erleben anderer, ist auch im besten Falle Ziemlich ärmlich und monoton.
Article in Der Jungkaufmann, April 1952 http://www.archive.org/stream/alberteinstein_03_reel03#page/n302/mode/1up, Einstein Archives 28-972
1950s

People , Books , Fashion , Thinking

“[T]his theme of mutually invisible life at widely differing scales bears an important implication for the “culture wars” that supposedly now envelop our universities and our intellectual discourse in general […]. One side of this false dichotomy features the postmodern relativists who argue that all culturally bound modes of perception must be equally valid, and that no factual truth therefore exists. The other side includes the benighted, old-fashioned realists who insist that flies truly have two wings, and that Shakespeare really did mean what he thought he was saying. The principle of scaling provides a resolution for the false parts of this silly dichotomy. Facts are facts and cannot be denied by any rational being. (Often, facts are also not at all easy to determine or specify—but this question raises different issues for another time.) Facts, however, may also be highly scale dependent—and the perceptions of one world may have no validity or expression in the domain of another. The one-page map of Maine cannot recognize the separate boulders of Acadia, but both provide equally valid representations of a factual coastline.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Lying Stones of Marrakech

"Room of One's Own", p. 355
The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2001)

Life , War , Truth , World

“The good and the bad mix themselves so thoroughly in our thoughts, even in our aspirations, that we must look for excellence rather in overcoming evil than in freeing ourselves from its influence.”

Anthony Trollope book He Knew He Was Right

He Knew He Was Right (1869), Ch. 60

Evil

“Working in the abstract way seems to release one’s personality and sharpen the perceptions so that in the observation of humanity or landscape it is the wholeness of inner intention which moves one so profoundly. The components fall into place and one is no longer aware of the detail except as the necessary significance of wholeness and unity.... a rhythm of form which has its roots in earth but reaches outwards towards the unknown experiences of the future. The thought underlying this form is, for me, the delicate balance the spirit of man maintains between his knowledge and the laws of the universe.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Source: 1961 - 1975, Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial autobiography', 1970, p. 286

Law , Way , Knowledge , Universe

“Abnormal, adj. Not conforming to standards in matters of thought and conduct. To be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

“I try to deal with things that maybe other people haven't thought about, emptiness, making a painting that isn't a painting. For years people have been concerned with what goes on inside the frame. Well maybe there is something going on outside the frame that could be considered an artistic idea.”

Robert Barry (1936) American artist

Robert Barry (1968), cited in: Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. New York, Praeger, 1973, p. 40. p. xii

People , Idea , Painting

“Images produce an intellectual process different from the ancient one or the one developed by classical education. It goes without saying that this process is not completely new; of course, since sight existed, and since people themselves chose their images, they also thought by means of images and entered into this kind of thinking. But this was limited and not frequent, because images were not dominant. The new factor in our day comes from the effect of visual reproduction’s triumph over all else, which involves us in the domination of one form of thought. This supremacy is new, even though we are not dealing with a completely new form of thought.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 210
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

People , Education , Thinking

“Once we have tasted the juice of words, our mind can no longer pass them by. We drink thought from them.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Drink

“!-- I come from the Arts Lab. Most of the writing I used to do was used for performance, so consequently I learnt that when you are reading a poem it has to read properly, which is to do with syllables and stresses. What takes me the longest with my fine writing, like say Voice of the Fire, is reading it through and finding the bits where it clunks, where it’s one syllable too long, and once you find that rhythm – the reader probably won’t be aware of it, consciously, but there is a tidal wave embedded in the prose that the reader is responding to. In the last chapter of Voice in the Fire, where it is actually me talking in my own voice, I don’t use the word ‘I’ or ‘me’ or ‘mine’. I don’t know why – perhaps I had been reading that Private Eye column where it is all ‘I’ ‘I’ ‘I’ and started to feel a bit self-conscious about it – but --> I thought if I can still be the central voice but without having an ‘I’ there, and by not having it there, it makes it easier for the reader to slip into the consciousness of the narrator. If you remove the letter ‘I’ it becomes a universal I. Everybody is the author walking down those streets while they are in the prose.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

Art , Feeling , Universe , Reading

“We define boredom as the pain a person feels when he’s doing nothing or something irrelevant, instead of something he wants to do but won’t, can’t, or doesn’t dare. Boredom is acute when he knows the other thing and inhibits his action, e. g., out of politeness, embarrassment, fear of punishment or shame. Boredom is chronic if he has repressed the thought of it and no longer is aware of it. A large part of stupidity is just the chronic boredom, for a person can’t learn, or be intelligent about, what he’s not interested in, when his repressed thoughts are elsewhere.”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Another large part of stupidity is stubbornness, unconsciously saying, “I won’t. You can’t make me.”
Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), pp. 71-72.

Pain , Stupidity , Fear , Feeling

““The Void Which Binds is touched by all of us who have wept with happiness, bidden a lover good-bye, been exalted with orgasm, stood over the grave of a loved one, or watched our baby open his or her eyes for the first time.”
Aenea is looking at me as she speaks, and I feel the gooseflesh rise along my arms.
“The Void Which Binds is always under and above the surface of our thoughts and senses,” she continues, invisible but as present as the breathing of our beloved next to us in the night. Its actual but unaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of almost-but-not-quite satisfying bullshit.””

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 20 (p. 400)

Love , Religion , Feeling , Lovers

“Abu Sa'id al-Khudri said, "Once when we were on a journey with the Prophet, a man came on a camel of his and began to look to his right and left. The Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, "Anyone who has a spare mount should prepare it for someone who does not have a mount to ride, and anyone who has extra provision should prepare it for someone who does not have any provision," and he mentioned the different categories of property until we thought that none of us had any right to anything in excess of our needs."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, 566 https://bewley.virtualave.net/riyad4.html
Sunni Hadith

Peace

“The more a person believes he’s free to think, the more I believe he’s a slave of his thoughts”

Ali Al-Wardi (1913–1995) Iraqi sociologist

Thinking , Personality

“A nervous blonde nymphet who thought that politics was some kind of game played by old people, like bridge.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

1970s, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 (1973)

People , Game

“…the real origin and essence of the hypnotic condition, is the induction of a habit of abstraction or mental concentration, in which, as in reverie or spontaneous abstraction, the powers of the mind are so much engrossed with a single idea or train of thought, as, for the nonce, to render the individual unconscious of, or indifferently conscious to, all other ideas, impressions, or trains of thought. The hypnotic sleep, therefore, is the very antithesis or opposite mental and physical condition to that which precedes and accompanies common sleep…”

James Braid (1795–1860) Scottish surgeon, hypnotist, and hypnotherapist

In The Discovery of Hypnosis: The Complete Writings of James Braid, the Father … (2008) http://books.google.co.in/books?id=Vs35STwQYQoC&pg=PA149.

Idea , Sleep , Training , Indifference

“We in the Western world have grown to understand matter as imprisoned light, and light as liberated matter, yet this has had no influence on our spiritual thought. In practical terms it only led to the creation of the atom bomb.”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Source: Sushama Londhe A Tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and Wisdom Spanning Continents and Time about India and Her Culture http://books.google.co.in/books?id=G3AMAQAAMAAJ, Pragun Publications, 2008, p. 341

World , Understanding , Light

“What I mean by living to one's-self is living in the world, as in it, not of it: it is as if no one know there was such a person, and you wished no one to know it: it is to be a silent spectator of the mighty scene of things, not an object of attention or curiosity in it; to take a thoughtful, anxious interest in what is passing in the world, but not to feel the slightest inclination to make or meddle with it.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On Living to One's-Self"
Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

World , Feeling , Personality

“Any man or woman - given real interest and prompted by the incentive to serve - who thinks, and loves, can be a healer, and it is time that people grasped that fact. The entire process of healing is thought- directed; it concerns the direction of energy currents or their abstraction, and this is another way of speaking about radiation and magnetism. Every initiate is a healer, and the more advanced the initiate the less is he occupied with the intricacies of centres and forces, energies and their direction. He heals automatically, as was the case with the initiate, Peter; of him we read that "the shadow of Peter passing by, healed everyone of them."”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: Esoteric Healing (1953), p. 601

Love , People , Way , Thinking

“To supply a thought is mental massage; but to evolve a thought of your own is an achievement. Thinking is a brain exercise — and no faculty grows save as it is exercised.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

Source: The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (1927), p. 64.

Exercises , Thinking

“My countrymen, the pioneers to whom I have alluded, these stalwart makers of America, could have no conception of our present day attainment. Hamilton, who conceived, and Washington, who sponsored, little dreamed of either a development or a solution like ours of today. But they were right in fundamentals. They knew what was faith, and preached security. One may doubt if either of them, if any of the founders, would wish America to hold aloof from the world. But there has come to us lately a new realization of the menace to our America in European entanglements which emphasizes the prudence of Washington, though he could little have dreamed the thought which is in my mind.”

Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) American politician, 29th president of the United States (in office from 1921 to 1923)

1920s, Nationalism and Americanism (1920)

World , Faith , Dreams

“Though the churches, in general, abstained from interfering officially, the scientific activities of the physicists have always been influenced by their private religious views. The latter, of course, were not necessarily identical with the ecclesiastical doctrines, but the philosophical attitudes of the scientists were affected, at least to some extent, by the prevailing religious thought. Kepler, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton freely acknowledged this influence; it played a part in the principle of least action in the eighteenth century. After this period, in which Kant's philosophy proclaimed the complete independence of scientific understanding and religious belief, not much more about it is found in physical writings. However, this by no means signifies that the investigational urge of later scientists was not intimately connected with their religiosity. The tenet that the scientific experience of truth in any sense is "theoria," i. e., a view of God, might be said sincerely about the best of them. The search for knowledge without regard to its applicability for use has been "an essential trait of man through the centuries, a sign of his higher origin."”

Max von Laue (1879–1960) German physicist

[Max von Laue, History of physics, Academic Press Inc, 1950, http://www.archive.org/details/historyofphysics030356mbp, 3-5]

God , Truth , Search , Understanding

“Barger thought Hunter provoked Junkie George so that the beating could be used as a gimmick to promote the book.”

William McKeen (1954) American academic

Source: Outlaw Journalist (2008), Chapter 7, Among The Angels, p. 111

Books

“Thou must be true thyself,
If thou the truth wouldst teach;
Thy soul must overflow, if thou
Another's soul would'st reach!
It needs the overflow of heart
To give the lips full speech.Think truly, and thy thoughts
Shall the world's famine feed;
Speak truly, and each word of thine
Shall be a fruitful seed;
Live truly, and thy life shall be
A great and noble creed.”

Horatius Bonar (1808–1889) British minister and poet

"Be True," from Hymns of Faith and Hope (1867)

Life , Truth , World , Soul

“She had come to Aka to learn how to sing this world's tune, to dance its dance; and at last, she thought, away from the city's endless noise, she was beginning to hear the music and to learn how to move to it.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Telling (2000), Ch. 4, §3 (p. 91)

World , Music , Learning , Singing

“Human life will no longer be regarded with the kind of superstitious awe which it is accorded in traditional thought, and the lives of non-humans will no longer be a matter of indifference. This means that human life will, in a sense, be devalued, while the value granted to non-human life will be increased. A revised view of such matters as suicide and euthanasia, as well as a revised view of how we should treat animals, will result.”

James Rachels (1941–2003) American philosopher

Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (1990), p. 5

Life , Sense , Suicide , Animals

“[A social worker has shown up to talk about Raffi's adoption during dinner with Toni's parents]
Sr. Ortiz: What's going on here?
Toni: Uh… mamá y papá, Gwynne… viene de la iglesia! ¡Sí, sí! Y viene para hablar… uh… del bautizo de Rafael! Decidimos que sería bueno que lo bautizaramos! (Mom, dad… Gwynne is… from the church! Yeah! And she's here to talk about, uh… Rafael's christening! We've decided to get him baptized!)
Sra. Ortiz: Gracias a Dios!
Sr. Ortiz: How very good of you to come, Sister.
Gwynne: Back at ya, brother! It's a pleasure in this day and age to meet folks who are so supportive of their daughter's decision.
Sra. Ortiz: That is unusual?! This country is even more wicked than I thought!
Gwynne: Yes, it's a shame, but many lesbians' parents tend to disapprove.
Sr. Ortiz: What does her being a … a homosexual have to do with it?
Gwynne: Exactly, Mr. Ortiz! If only more people felt like you!”

Alison Bechdel book Dykes to Watch Out For

#246, "The Converts" (1996), collected in Hot, Throbbing DTWOF (1997).
Dykes to Watch Out For

People , Pleasure , Age , Moms

“In the course of history … new books have been written that have won their place in the list. Books once thought entitled to belong to it have been superseded; and this process of change will continue as long as men can think and write. It is the task of every generation to reassess the tradition in which it lives, to discard what it cannot use, and to bring into context with the distant and intermediate past the most recent contributions to the Great Conversation. … the West needs to recapture and reemphasize and bring to bear upon its present problems the wisdom that lies in the works of its greatest thinkers and in the discussion that they have carried on.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Wisdom , Men , Books , History

“Feeling must have a medium in order to function at all; in the same way, thought must have symbols. It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being, just as do responses tot the objects of the external world... The medium of painting is such changing and ordering on an ideal plane, ideal in that the medium is more tractable, subtle, and capable of emphasis (abstraction is a kind of emphasis) than everyday life.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Source: 1940s, Beyond the Aesthetics' (1946), pp. 38-39

Life , World , Art , Way

“Orpheus' mistake wasn't that he turned and looked back towards Eurydice and Hell, but that he ever thought he could escape. Same with Lot's wife. Averting our eyes does not change the fact that we are marked.”

Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964) writer

Houses Under the Sea (2007)

Hell , Change

“As he lay on Wenlock Edge, with the sheep nibbling the grass close about him as they or their betters had nibbled the grass — or whatever there was to nibble — in the Silurian kingdom of Pteraspis, he seemed to have fallen on an evolution far more wonderful than that of fishes. He did not like it; he could not account for it; and he determined to stop it. Never since the days of his Limulus ancestry had any of his ascendants thought thus. Their modes of thought might be many, but their thought was one. Out of his millions of millions of ancestors, back to the Cambrian mollusks, every one had probably lived and died in the illusion of Truths which did not amuse him, and which had never changed. Henry Adams was the first in an infinite series to discover and admit to himself that he really did not care whether truth was, or was not, true. He did not even care that it should be proved true, unless the process were new and amusing. He was a Darwinian for fun.

From the beginning of history, this attitude had been branded as criminal — worse than crime — sacrilege! Society punished it ferociously and justly, in self-defence.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Truth , History , Fish , Grass

“The ruling Left milks the working Swedes to maintain a predominantly idle immigrant population, who thankfully vote for the Left. Swedish society has to support two parasites, each living in a symbiotic relationship with the other. That is, in this particular game of thought.”

Jussi Halla-aho (1971) Finnish Slavic linguist, blogger and a politician

Jussi Halla-aho (2006), translation published in the blog Multicultural Discourse in Finland and Sweden http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.ch/2006/08/multicultural-discourse-in-finland-and.html, August 30, 2006
2005-09

Game , Support

“The bleak and yet so intimate nature of the mountains has had an enormous impact on the painter. It has deepened his love for his subjects and at the same time purged his vision of everything that is secondary. Nothing inessential appears in the paintings, but how delicately every detail is worked out! The creative thought emerges strongly and nakedly from the finished work. Kirchner is now so taken up with entirely new problems that one cannot apply the old criteria to him if one is to do justice to his work. Those who wish to classify him on the strength of his German paintings will be both disappointed and surprised. Far from destroying him, his serious illness has matured him. Besides his work on visible life, creativity stemming solely from the imagination has opened up its vast potential to him – for this the brief span of his life will probably be far from sufficient.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

Quote from the 'Preface' of the catalog of Kirchner's Frankfurt exhibition in 1922, (written by Kirchner, about Kirchner under his pseudonym de:Louis de Marsalle); as quoted in the biography-pdf http://www.kirchnermuseum.ch/data/media/downloads/Biography.pdf of the Kirchner museum, Davos
1920's

Love , Life , Justice , Disappointment