Thought Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Death is easier to bear without thinking of it, than the thought of death without peril.

The doctors are all agreed that I am suffering for want of society. Was never a case like it. First, I did not know that I was suffering at all. Secondly, as an Irishman might say, I had thought it was indigestion of the society I got.

Henry David Thoreau

To bed, to bed; sleep kill those pretty eyes,
And give as soft attachment to thy senses,
As infants empty of all thought.

William Shakespeare

We may like well to know what is Plato's and what is Montesquieu's or Goethe's part, and what thought was always dear to the writer himself; but the worth of the sentences consists in their radiancy and equal aptitude to all intelligence. They fit all our facts like a charm. We respect ourselves the more that we know them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

You, your families, your friends and your countries are to be exterminated by the common decision of a few brutal but powerful men. To please these men, all the private affections, all the public hopes, all that has been achieved in art, and knowledge and thought and all that might be achieved hereafter is to be wiped out forever.
Our ruined lifeless planet will continue for countless ages to circle aimlessly round the sun unredeemed by the joys and loves, the occasional wisdom and the power to create beauty which have given value to human life.

Bertrand Russell

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.

Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them.

Henry David Thoreau

Those who pray always are necessary to those who never pray. In our view, the whole question is in the amount of thought that is mingled with prayer.

The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity

Theodor W. Adorno

We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

But the thought is one thing, the deed is another, and another yet is the image of the deed. The wheel of causality does not roll between them.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.

Expediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned; much is to say on both sides,and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles add a line.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

For, truly speaking, whoever provokes me to a good act or thought has given me a pledge of his fidelity to virtue,--he has come under the bonds to adhere to that cause to which we are jointly attached.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is some sense — easier to feel than to state — in which time is an unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality. Past and future must be acknowledged to be as real as the present, and a certain emancipation from slavery to time is essential to philosophic thought.

Bertrand Russell

You call yourself free? I want to hear your ruling thought and not that you have escaped a yoke. Are you such a one as was permitted to escape a yoke? There are some who threw away their ultimate worth when they threw away their servitude. Free from what? What is that to Zarathustra! But your eyes should announce to me brightly: free for what?

Friedrich Nietzsche

The spaces of the universe enfold me and swallow me up like a speck; but I, by the power of thought, may comprehend the universe.

It is delightful to read on the spot the impressions and opinions of tourists who visited a hundred years ago, in the vehicles and with the aesthetic prejudices of the period, the places which you are visiting now. The voyage ceases to be a mere tour through space; you travel through time and thought as well.

Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable.

Ernest Hemingway

A young man once asked him in, as he thought, an offensive manner, whether he did not find stammering very inconvenient. He answered, 'No, Sir, it gives me time for reflection, and saves me from asking impertinent questions.'

Of Erasmus Darwin

Let us put our trust in God and console ourselves with the thought that all is well, if it is in accordance with the will of the Almighty, as He knows best what is profitable and beneficial to our temporal happiness and our eternal salvation.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.

Vincent van Gogh

If we will not interfere with our thought, but will act entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, we know the particular thing, and every thing, and every man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There was never anything that did not proceed from a thought.

Ralph Waldo Emerson