Thought Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think what you shall write.

William Cobbett

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

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.

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

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.

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

Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.

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

Elizabeth A. Drew

His love at once and dread instruct our thought; As man He suffer'd and as God He taught.

So sweet love seemed that April morn,
When first we kissed beside the thorn,
So strangely sweet, it was not strange
We thought that love could never change.

Mom brought me some peanut butter cookies and a biography of Judy Garland. She told me she thought my problem was that I was too impatient, my fuse was too short, that I was only interested in instant gratification. I said, "Instant gratification takes too long." The glib martyr.

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

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

Of Winston Churchill

The vanishing volatile froth of the present, which any shadow will alter, any thought blow away, any event annihilate, is every moment converted into the adamantine record of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature's law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packaged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man.

[Miele] really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.

The moon was shining sulkily, Because she thought the sun Had got no business to be there After the day was done —

There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart - an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime

Edgar Allan Poe

Masters, it is proved already that you are little better than false knaves, and it will go near to be thought so shortly.

William Shakespeare

Pope had been flattered till he thought himself one of the moving powers of the system of life. When he talked of laying down his pen, those who sat round him intreated and implored; and self-love did not suffer him to suspect that they went away and laughed.

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions think.

Once you encourage the thought of compassion in your mind, once it becomes active, then your attitude towards others changes automatically.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I don't want to be just another blade of grass."

Simone de Beauvoir

Frankly, I do not like the idea of conversations to define the term "unconditional surrender."The German people can have dinned into their ears what I said in my Christmas Eve speech--in effect, that we have no thought of destroying the German people and that we want them to live through the generations like other European peoples on condition, of course, that they get rid of their present philosophy of conquest.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

If man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception.