Thought Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Amsterdam was a great surprise to me. I had always thought of Venice as the city of canals; it had never entered my mind that I should find similar conditions in a Dutch town.

James Weldon Johnson

In the long course of history, having people who understand your thought is much greater security than another submarine.

J. William Fulbright

One way to find food for thought is to use the fork in the road, the bifurcation that marks the place of emergence in which a new line of development begins to branch off.

William Irwin Thompson

I have written my life in small sketches, a little today, a little yesterday, as I have thought of it, as I remember all the things from childhood on through the years, good ones, and unpleasant ones, that is how they come out and that is how we have to take them.
I look back on my life like a good day's work, it was done and I am satisfied with it. I was happy and contented, I knew nothing better and made the best out of what life offered. And life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.

When a thought is too weak to be expressed simply, it should be rejected.

Luc de Clapiers

Pure love is a willingness to give without a thought of receiving anything in return.

We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder 'censorship,' we call it 'concern for commercial viability.

Better than honor and glory, and History's iron pen, Was the thought of duty done and the love of his fellow-men.

Richard Watson Gilder

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

Albert Szent-Györgyi

I thought he was a young man of promise, but it appears he is a young man of promises.

Of Winston Churchill

Just as there is no loss of basic energy in the universe, so no thought or action is without its effects, present or ultimate, seen or unseen, felt or unfelt.

What would it profit thee to be the first Of echoes, tho thy tongue should live forever, A thing that answers, but hath not a thought As lasting but as senseless as a stone.

Frederick Tennyson

That thing of hell and eternal punishment is the most absurd, as well as the most disagreeable thought that ever entered into the head of mortal man.

George Berkeley

A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe.

It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought. It is the opening of our mental pores, and the stimulus of marshaling our ideas in words, of setting them forth as gallantly and as graciously as we can.

I reached for sleep and drew it round me like a blanket muffling pain and thought together in the merciful dark

The court has built a great deal of prestige, and I think is generally quite well thought of as a public institution in the country. It is always possible for the court to overreach its proper bounds and perhaps declare a lot of laws unconstitutional and frustrate the will of the majority in a way that it ought not be frustrated. In that sense, it poses a danger, but not the same sort of perhaps very active danger that a run-away Congress or runaway executive would.

William Rehnquist

This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought.

Ever since the arrival of printing - thought to be the invention of the devil because it would put false opinions into people's minds - people have been arguing that new technology would have disastrous consequences for language.

In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life. (It has always struck me as strange, by the way, that Alfred Nobel did not institute a philosophy prize, or for that matter that he instituted a physics prize but not a mathematics prize, to say nothing of a music prize - music is, after all, more universal than literature, which is bound to a particular language.) The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.

Our homeland is the whole world. Our law is liberty. We have but one thought, revolution in our hearts.

I thought: hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.

Revolutions are brought about by men, by men who think as men of action and act as men of thought.

The world is not run by thought, nor by imagination, but by opinion.

Elizabeth A. Drew

Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals. It can only be ensured by instinct, sharpened by thought practicing the stroke so often that at the crisis it is as natural as a reflex.