Thought Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Life is like a cash register, in that every account, every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.

Fulton J. Sheen

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

William Ellery Channing

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

But I owe it to the subject to say, that it has long afforded me what philosophy is so often thought, and made, barren of - the fun of discovery, the pleasures of co-operation, and the satisfaction of reaching agreement.

There is something in the decay of nature that awakens thought, even in the most trifling mind.

Sarah Josepha Hale

That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.

George Berkeley

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs, and explosions, and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy; and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is, that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.

Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man, but they don't bite everybody.

Stanisław Jerzy Lec

This book, conceived in sorrow, composed in grief, and constructed at the brink of despair, contains my mind's best thoughts, and my soul's triumph over the powers of darkness.

Isaac Mayer Wise

Second thoughts oftentimes are the very worst of all thoughts.

William Shenstone

As a child I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to "write stories." Still I had a dearer pleasure than this, which was the formation of castles in the air—the indulging in waking dreams—the following up trains of thought, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents. My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings.

The intellect is a cold thing and a merely intellectual idea will never stimulate thought in the same manner that a spiritual idea does.

You may glory in a team triumphant, but you will fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he was a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it.

We want the spirit of America to be efficient; we want American character to be efficient; we want American character to display itself in what I may, perhaps, be allowed to call spiritual efficiency—clear, disinterested thinking and fearless action along the right lines of thought. America is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us; and it can consist of all of us only as our spirits are banded together in a common enterprise.

We travel to learn; and I have never been in any country where they did not do something better than we do it, think some thoughts better than we think, catch some inspiration from heights above our own.

One single grateful thought raised to heaven is the most perfect prayer.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

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.

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.

Wallace Stevens

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.

The development of the telescope, together with increased knowledge of things, brought men to see that the earth is not what man had once thought it to be.

Joseph Franklin Rutherford

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass of thought engenders a system of values.

Ferdinand de Saussure

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