Thought Quotes

Thinking can only serve to measure out the helplessness of thought.

~ H. Rider Haggard

The survivor spoke to us though, or tried to. Mumbling through that matted brown beard of his, pale as death itself. I can’t say now if it was weakness from his wounds or what it was – but we struggled to understand him. In fact we got nothing intelligible from him at all then. He seemed afraid, like any dying man probably would be, but he did seem more terrified than any dying man I’ve seen before – and I’ve seen a few in my time. Let me tell you, Corsair or not, he grabbed whatever hand would hold his, and clenched it so tight his knuckles turned white! He kept fading out as we carried him on the stretcher board the medics brought with them. Looking back, I think he tried to warn us, poor bastard. He tried to tell us to leave him behind and go, but we wouldn’t listen. We thought we were better than the Corsairs, remember? We thought we would be all moral and upright and try to help him. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ were the last words he said before losing consciousness. At least, those that we could make out. At the end of it all, he was right – as it turned out, we couldn’t even help ourselves.

~ Christina Engela

You will look young when you feel young, but to simply feel that you are young will not always cause you to feel young. The real feeling of youth comes when we actually think in the consciousness of youth and give the realization of the now to every thought.

~ Christian D. Larson

I believe in the power of love, and planting positive thought seeds into the collective consciousness.

~ Jay Woodman

With no one to confide in, she'd held the argument inside her own head and naturally found a way to dissolve facts into concepts and concepts into explanations that in the end explained nothing at all.

~ Vincent H. O'neil

He felt the journal in his pocket. It was like a pair of glasses that he had worn for a time, enabling him to see a world he didn't even know existed.

~ Rebecca Rash

Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life.

~ Hermann Hesse

Always take all the time to reflect that circumstances permit, but when the time for action has come, stop thinking. (Andrew Jackson)

~ Jon Meacham

The words are meaningless except in terms of feeling. Does anyone act as the result of thought or does feeling stimulate action and sometimes thought implement it.

~ John Steinbeck

How doe we define the energy of thought versus the energy of action.

~ Meg Rosoff

It's better to do things you like than to think about what you don't like.

~ Marty Rubin

It is better to do something you like than to think about what you don't like.

~ Marty Rubin

But one thing is the thought, another thing is the deed, and another thing is the idea of the deed. The wheel of causality doth not roll between them.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Every thought precedes an action.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

There is really no substitute for a well thought out and perfectly executed plan of action.

~ Steven Redhead

Action disconcerts us, partly because of our physical incompetence, but mainly because it offends our moral sensibility. We consider it immoral to act. It seems to us that every thought is debased when expressed in words, which transform the thought into the property of others, making it understandable to anyone who can understand it.

~ Fernando Pessoa

A thought is of a much higher value than an action.

~ Harshit Walia

One can be a pessimist in thought but not in action.

~ Marty Rubin

No matter how cold your proverbial winter, you can plant seeds of change in your life by changing your thoughts and actions.

~ Andra Brynnoeglein

The deed is nothing. It is the thought that breeds fear, and we achieve little by lingering.

~ Alan Garner

An action made by a unwitting man, shall not define, nor justify a common though and interpretation.

~ Even Engesland

No cause occurs without effect, and no effect occurs without cause. No unjust action goes without penalty, and no action or thought flows unnoticed throughout the universe.

~ Suzy Kassem

Your achievements and success are dependent on a well thought through plan of action.

~ Sunday Adelaja

God rewards a person not for the deeds he does openly, but according to the thoughts and actions he has in secret.

~ Sunday Adelaja

The fundamental difference between an instinctive response and an emotion is this: An instinctive response is the body’s direct response to some external situation. An emotion, on the other hand, is the body’s response to thought. Indirectly, an emotion can also be a response to an actual situation or event, but it will be a response to the event seen through the filter of a mental interpretation, the future of thought, that is to say, through the mental concepts of good and bad, like and dislike, me and mine.

~ Eckhart Tolle

A product in the marketplace is the result of thought in an inner space and action more than the common place.

~ Ryan Lilly

Think like a man of action but act like a woman of thought.

~ Amit Abraham

To the Bullock RoserootWhat's the thought you thinkall your life long?It must be a great one,a solemn one, to make you gazethrough the world at it,all your life long.When you have to look aside from ityour eyes roll, you bellowin anger, anxiousto return to it, steadilyto gaze at it, think itall your life long.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

You'll know you're doing something right if you feel you don't know what you're doing... if you know what you are doing, you are doing it right- but you might just repeating yourself...

~ Natasha Tsakos

What a huge inaccessible lumber-room of thought and experience we amounted to, I thought; how much we are, how little we transmit.

~ H.g. Wells

Thoughts of harmony allow experiences of harmony.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

~ George Orwell

Isn't language loss a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world's people? Perhaps, but it's a bad thing in other respects. Languages differ in structure and vocabulary, in how they express causation and feelings and personal responsibility, hence in how they shape our thoughts. There's no single purpose best language; instead, different languages are better suited for different purposes. For instance, it may not have been an accident that Plato and Aristotle wrote in Greek, while Kant wrote in German. The grammatical particles of those two languages, plus their ease in forming compound words, may have helped make them the preeminent languages of western philosophy. Another example, familiar to all of us who studied Latin, is that highly inflected languages (ones in which word endings suffice to indicate sentence structure) can use variations of word order to convey nuances impossible with English. Our English word order is severely constrained by having to serve as the main clue to sentence structure. If English becomes a world language, that won't be because English was necessarily the best language for diplomacy.

~ Jared Diamond

It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Language is the dress of thought.

~ Samuel Johnson

Like prepositional phrases, certain structural arrangements in English are much more important than the small bones of grammar in its most technical sense. It really wouldn't matter much if we started dropping the s from our plurals. Lots of words get along without it anyway, and in most cases context would be enough to indicate number. Even the distinction between singular and plural verb forms is just as much a polite convention as an essential element of meaning. But the structures, things like passives and prepositional phrases, constitute, among other things, an implicit system of moral philosophy, a view of the world and its presumed meanings, and their misuse therefore often betrays an attitude or value that the user might like to disavow.

~ Richard Mitchell

Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words.

~ Steven Pinker

Grammarians make no new thoughts, but thoughts make new grammar.

~ Dagobert D. Runes

Language has been mobilised and sent into battle; it directs the human carnage of conflict with its enunciation of emotion, stimulating souls to abandon peace.

~ Daniel S. Fletcher

How beautiful to touch another's soul with a word, a gesture, a thought.

~ Marty Rubin