Thought Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Only what is thought, said, or done at a certain rare coincidence is good.

Henry David Thoreau

I am less affected by their heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the steady and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snow-plow for their winter quarters; who have not merely the three-o'-clock-in-the-morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of their iron steed are frozen.

Henry David Thoreau

Thought dissolves the material universe by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

How can we learn self-knowledge? Never by taking thought but rather by action. Try to do your duty and you'll soon discover what you're like.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

Arthur Schopenhauer

the sense of being which in calm hours arises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source.... Here is the fountain of action and of thought.... We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

By undue profundity we perplex and enfeeble thought; and it is possible to make even Venus herself vanish from the firmament by a scrutiny too sustained, too concentrated, or too direct.

Edgar Allan Poe

All our dignity consists of thought. It is from there that we must be lifted up and not from space and time, which we could never fill. So let us work on thinking well. That is the principle of morality.

Mediocrity has no greater consolation than in the thought that genius is not immortal.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It was the first time it had ever occurred to me, that this detestable cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed.

Charles Dickens

Where my own mission is concerned, my thought is active, and I try to wish everyone well in spite of doubts and mistrust.

The work is an absolute necessity for me. I can't put it off, I don't care for anything but the work; that is to say, the pleasure in something else ceases at once and I become melancholy when I can't go on with my work. Then I feel like a weaver who sees that his threads are tangled, and the pattern he had on the loom is gone to hell, and all his thought and exertion is lost.

Vincent van Gogh

In the great majority of mathematical text-books there is a total lack of unity in method and of systematic development of a central theme. Propositions of very diverse kinds are proved by whatever means are thought most easily intelligible, and much space is devoted to mere curiosities which in no way contribute to the main argument.

Bertrand Russell

We grow hostile to many an artist or writer, not because we finally come to see he has deceived us, but because he thought no subtler means were required to ensnare us.

Friedrich Nietzsche

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought.

Would you be a poet Before you've been to school? Ah, well! I hardly thought you So absolute a fool.

Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?

Bertrand Russell

Mine eyes Were not in fault, for she was beautiful; Mine ears, that heard her flattery; nor my heart, That thought her like her seeming. It had been vicious To have mistrusted her.

William Shakespeare

We want but two or three friends, but these we cannot do without, and they serve us in every thought we think.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be like you thought our love would last too long, if it were chain'd together

William Shakespeare

Thinking, alone, can never lead to any knowledge of external objects. Sense perception is the beginning of all research, and the truth of theoretical thought is given exclusively by its relation to the sum total of those experiences. Physics, Philosophy, and Scientific Progress

Albert Einstein

In the daily lives of most men and women, fear plays a greater part than hope: they are more filled with the thought of the possessions that others may take from them, than of the joy that they might create in their own lives and in the lives with which they come in contact. It is not so that life should be lived.

Bertrand Russell