Thought Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.

Thomas De Quincey

Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you'll start having positive results.

I wish I could throw off the thoughts which poison my happiness, but I take a kind of pleasure in indulging them.

Frédéric Chopin

If you realized how powerful your thoughts are, you would never think a negative thought.

It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.... "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Oh, high is the price of parenthood,
And daughters may cost you double.
You dare not forget, as you thought you could,
That youth is a plague and a trouble.

Phyllis McGinley

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.

First thoughts are not always the best.

Vittorio Alfieri

Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

When you cease from labour, fill up your time in reading, meditation, and prayer: and while your hands are labouring, let your heart be employed, as much as possible, in divine thoughts.

To communicate through silence is a link between the thoughts of man.

But I have always thought the only genius that's worth anything is the genius for hard work.

Kathleen Winsor

Decisions should be based on facts, objectively considered — what I call the fact-founded, thought-through approach to decision making.

Life is not lost by dying! Life is lost
Minute by minute, day by dragging day,
In all the thousand, small, uncaring ways,
The smooth appeasing compromises of time,
Which are King Herod and King Herod's men,
Always and always. Life can be
Lost without vision but not lost by death,
Lost by not caring, willing, going on
Beyond the ragged edge of fortitude
To something more — something no man has ever seen.
You who love money, you who love yourself,
You who love bitterness, and I who loved
and lost and thought I could not love again,
And all the people of this little town,
Rise up! The loves we had were not enough.
Something is loosed to change the shaken world,
And with it we must change!

Stephen Vincent Benét

This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.

It can even be thought that radium could become very dangerous in criminal hands, and here the question can be raised whether mankind benefits from knowing the secrets of Nature, whether it is ready to profit from it or whether this knowledge will not be harmful for it.

The game of life is the game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later, with astounding accuracy.

Florence Scovel Shinn

Oh, the comfort—the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person—having neither to weigh thoughts, nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.

Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt.

How or by what magic is it, that we convey our thoughts to one another with such case and accuracy?

Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?

Idolatry is in a man's own thought, not in the opinion of another.

If it is indeed impossible — or at least very difficult — to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.

The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded on fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts, and we grow happier as we grow older.

William Lyon Phelps