THOUGHT

Related Subjects: Consideration, Contemplation, Idea, Intelligence, Meditation, Philosophy, Reflection, Reverie, Speculation, Theories

1. If you strike
   Upon a thought that baffles you, break off
   From that entanglement and try another
   So shall your wits be fresh to start again.—ARISTOPHANES, The Clouds
   

2. It is much less what we do
   Than what we think, which fits us for the future.—PHILIP J. BAILEY, Festus
   

3. Who can mistake great thoughts?
   They seize upon the mind—arrest, and search,
   And shake it.—PHILIP J. BAILEY, Festus
   

4. As he thinketh in his heart, so is he.—Bible, Proverbs 23:7
   

5. Back of the beating hammer
   By which the steel is wrought,
   Back of the workshop's clamor
   The seeker may find the Thought.—BERTON BRALEY, The Thinker
   

6. Sickening thought itself engendereth corporal pain.—ROBERT BRIDGES, The Testament of Beauty
   

7. To most people nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking.—SIR JAMES BRYCE, Studies in History and Jurisprudence
   

8. The dominant thought of youth is the bigness of the world, of age its smallness. As we grow older we escape from the tyranny of matter and recognise that the true centre of gravity is in the mind.—JOHN BUCHAN, Pilgrim's Way
   

9. Thought alone is eternal.—BULWER-LYTTON, Lucile
   

10. It is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.—SAMUEL BUTLER,
    The Way of All Flesh
    

11. I stood
    Among them, but not of them; in a shroud
    Of thoughts which were not their thoughts.—BYRON, Childe Harold
    

12. The lightning-spark of Thought, generated or say rather heaven-kindled, in the solitary mind, awakens its express likeness in another mind, in a thousand other minds, and all blaze up together in combined fire.—CARLYLE, Sir Walter Scott
    

13. It should be as easy to expel an obnoxious thought from your mind as to shake a stone out of your shoe.—EDWARD CARPENTER, A Visit to a Gnani
    

14. "Really, now you ask me," said Alice, very much confused, "I don't think—"
    "Then you shouldn't talk," said the Hatter.—LEWIS CARROLL, Alice in Wonderland
    

15. A New Thinker is only one who does not know what the old thinkers have thought.—FRANK M. COLBY
    

16. Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.—HAVELOCK ELLIS, The Dance of Life
    

17. The world's greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for that a professorial chair offers no special opportunities.—HAVELOCK ELLIS, The Dance of Life
    

18. To think is to act.—EMERSON, Spiritual Laws
    

19. Second thoughts are ever wiser.—EURIPIDES, Hippolytus
    

20. And to cease to think is but little different from ceasing to be.—FRANKLIN
    

21. The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame.—THOMAS HOBBES, Leviathan
    

22. A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labour and there is an invisible labour.—VICTOR HUGO, Les Miserables
    

23. No thought which I have ever had has satisfied my soul.—RICHARD JEFFERIES, The Story of my Heart
    

24. On the shore
    Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
    Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.—KEATS, When I Have Fears
    

25. Cannon-balls may aid the truth,
    But thought's a weapon stronger;
    We'll win our battles by its aid;—
    Wait a little longer.—CHARLES MACKAY, The Good Time Coming
    

26. If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you. If you really make them think they'll hate you.—DON MARQUIS, The Sun Dial
    

27. It is thy very energy of thought
    Which keeps thee, from thy God.—CARDINAL NEWMAN, Dream of Gerontius
    

28. If there is anything that cannot bear free thought, let it crack.—WENDELL PHILLIPS
    

29. It is for want of thinking that most men are undone.—Proverb
    

30. The man who idly sits and thinks,
    May sow a nobler crop than corn,
    For thoughts are seeds of future deeds,
    And when God thought—the world was born!—HARRY ROMAINE, Inaction
    

31. There's something so beautiful in coming on one's very own inmost thoughts in another. In one way it's one of the greatest pleasures one has.—OLIVE SCHREINER
    

32. There is nothing either good or bad,
    But thinking makes it so.—SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet
    

33. Speak to me as to thy thinkings,
    As thou dost ruminate, and give thy worst of thoughts
    The worst of words.—SHAKESPEARE, Othello
    

34. Love's heralds should be thoughts
    Which ten times faster glide than the sun's beams.—SHAKESPEARE, Romeo and Juliet
    

35. Nimble thought can jump both sea and land.—SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet XLIV
    

36. They are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts.—SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, Arcadia
    

37. The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new.—ALEXANDER SMITH, DREAMTHORP
    

38. Thinking is but an idle waste of thought
    And nought is everything, and everything is nought.—HORACE SMITH, Rejected Addresses
    

39. What thought can think, another thought can mend.—ROBERT SOUTH WELL, Look Home
    

40. A penny for your thoughts.—SWIFT, Polite Conversation
    

41. The laws of being are the laws of thought.
    Thought is conditioned by being; not being by thought.—GENEVIEVE TAGGARD
    

42. Though a man a thinking being is defined,
    Few use the grand prerogative of mind.
    How few think justly of the thinking few!
    How many never think, who think they do!—JANE TAYLOR, Essays in Rhyme
    

43. Our great thoughts, our great affections, the truths of our life, never leave us. Surely they cannot separate from our consciousness, shall follow it whithersoever that shall go, and are of their nature divine and immortal.—THACKERAY
    

44. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.—THOREAU, Walden
    

45. It is not given to any man, however endowed, to rise spontaneously into intellectual splendor without the parentage of antecedent thought.—JOHN TYNDALL, Fragments of Science
    

46. The brightest flashes in the world of thought are incomplete until they have been proved to have their counterparts in the world of fact.—JOHN TYNDALL,
    Fragments of Science
    

47. But hushed be every thought that springs
    From out the bitterness of things.—WORDSWORTH, Elegiac Stanzas
    

48. O Reader! had you in your mind
    Such stores as silent thought can bring,
    O gentle Reader! you would find
    A tale in everything.—WORDSWORTH, Simon Lee