Thought Quotes

Sometimes things seem good at first . . . but we learn the hard way that they weren't as good as we thought.

~ Melody Carlson

Think a thousand times when you get a bad though, but not once when you get a good one.

~ Dreamer

Men are tested and tried amongst deceptions radically and they are winning for themselves abilities to give, to deliberate, to stand fast, to choose well, to discriminate.” “They are far from the 'automata' of the Universe some think them to be. They dance the starry path and are sharpening their knowledge with every orbit of each positive thought travelled.

~ Gabriel Brunsdon

For years I thought we were on the same page...then I discovered we were NOT even in the same book...

~ Kjforce

What you think and how you think, influences what you ink and how you ink.

~ Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Only in the world of mathematics do two negatives multiply into a positive.

~ Abby Morel

Propaganda is what gives us the freedom to do as we are told.

~ Markus W. Lunner

If your callswere measures of Time,a day would last a centuryand in between us would beAn Eternity.

~ Natasha Tsakos

I just know that I don't want cheating. I refuse. I deepened myself but I don't believe in myself because my thought is invented.

~ Clarice Lispector

Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.

~ Anthony De Mello

A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Individual free choices” can only be the expression of an “individual free will”.The notion of an “individual free will” generating “individual free choices” creates a much needed consequence: personal accountability.Personal accountability is vital for a primitive, immature human organization based on reprehension or praise.The permanent interaction of a unique inherited Nature (and maybe a unique “soul”) with a unique nurture (environment), will always determine all our “individual free choices”, from cradle to grave. It is impossible for the individual to be sentient before birth and choose these two or three unique factors.The logic of holding someone personally accountable for a “non-chosen” choice eludes me.The notion of individual free will can at best be a “gut felt” illusion, but can never have logical relevance.What sort of human (and divine!) organization can be based on the consequence of a “gut felt” illusion?-Our current one; primitive, illogical, unstable and permanently conflictual.Be it for all individual choices or all differences, the definitive ban of the illusionary notion of personal accountability is the missing step that will lead to human maturity.How’s your “gut” now?

~ Haroutioun Bochnakian

This road will be new because you will see a given emotion as a choice rather than a condition of life.

~ Wayne W. Dyer

If he had learned anything in manhood, it was that it didn’t matter what other people thought of him—even the ones he respected. In the end, he would patch together a life, with its sorry errors and its triumphs, just as they had.

~ Conn Iggulden

We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.

~ Oliver Sacks

For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

~ Kahlil Gibran

Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them.… The more people's standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion.

~ Hannah Arendt

Stories should be natural as apples, brief as lust, long as a thought.

~ Leonard Michaels

Expression is a function of intention and intention emanates from your thought faculty.

~ Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives.

~ George Lakoff

...[P]hilosophical theories are structured by conceptual metaphors that constrain which inferences can be drawn within that philosophical theory. The (typically unconscious) conceptual metaphors that are constitutive of a philosophical theory have the causal effect of constraining how you can reason within that philosophical framework.

~ George Lakoff

Religion should be subject to commonsense appraisal and rational review, as openly discussible as, say, politics, art and the weather. The First Amendment, we should recall, forbids Congress both from establishing laws designating a state religion and from abridging freedom of speech. There is no reason why we should shy away from speaking freely about religion, no reason why it should be thought impolite to debate it, especially when, as so often happens, religious folk bring it up on their own and try to impose it on others.

~ Jeffrey Tayler

We are all human, and our senses are quicker to prompt us than our reason. Every man gives off a scent, and that scent tells you how to act before your head does.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate.

~ Bertrand Russell

In the deep, tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that the Devon School came into existence the day i entered it, was vibrantly real while i was a student there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left

~ John Knowles

I didn't flee a dictator or swim an ocean to be an American like some do. I just thought long and hard about it.

~ Craig Ferguson

We think too much and feel too little.

~ Charlie Chaplin

A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

How frail the human heart must be―a mirrored pool of thought.

~ Sylvia Plath

The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.

~ William Blake

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I thought, possibly, that what I really needed was to go where nobody knew me and start over again, with none of my previous decisions, conversations, or expectations coming with me.

~ Maggie Stiefvater

Her mind is an unquiet one, words and thoughts and impulses constantly crashing into each other.

~ David Levithan

A genius is someone who takes a complex thing and makes it look simple. An academic does the opposite.

~ Robert Fanney

Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete proving nature's laws wrong it learned 2 walkwithout having feet

~ Tupac Shakur

If you're in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it'll make everyone think how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them.

~ Jack Handey

I give no sources, because it is indifferent to mewhether what I have thought has already beenthought before me by another.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

I dislike interaction. The less I say the better I feel. I was naturally a loner. I didn’t want conversation, or to goanywhere. I didn’t understand other people who wanted to share their emotions. Parties sickened me. I was drawn toall the wrong things: I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What Ireally wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone. Relationships never worked with me. I alwayslost interest. I simply disliked people, crowds, anywhere, except at my readings.

~ Charles Bukowski

For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

~ George Eliot

Don't keep forever on the public road,going only where others have gone, and following one after the other like a flock of sheep. Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. 'Every time you do so you will be certain to find something that you have never seen before. Of course it will be a little thing, but do not ignore it. Follow it up, explore all around it; one discovery will lead to another, and before you know it you will have something worth thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the results of thought.

~ Alexander Graham Bell