quotations about thought
Ideas are the seeds of thought, but they do not produce flowers unless the soil where they are sown is fertile.
LADY BLESSINGTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
A person is limited only by the thoughts that he chooses.
JAMES ALLEN
As a Man Thinketh
Thoughts there are, not to be translated into any language, and spirits alone can read them.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
A fickle goddess Thought at times--
Try ne'er so hard we catch her not.
We try to think: 'tis all in vain--
Imprisoned never is a thought.
Like lightning flashing through the clouds,
It comes--a light, and then is gone,
A star which falls adown through space,
Again it comes as morning dawn.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"What is Thought?"
To follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one's pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
Great thoughts come from the heart.
LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES
Reflections and Maxims
The world is your kaleidoscope, and the varying combinations of colours, which at every succeeding moment it presents to you are the exquisitely adjusted pictures of your ever-moving thoughts.
JAMES ALLEN
As a Man Thinketh
To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
Each flying thought, a flying thought pursues.
C. B. LANGSTON
"Thought"
Mankind will be enslaved until there is mental grandeur enough to allow each man to have his thought and say. This earth will be a paradise when men can, upon all these questions differ, and yet grasp each other's hands as friends.
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
Some Mistakes of Moses
Great thoughts, like great deeds, need no trumpet.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Festus
A thought by thought is piled, till some great truth
Is loosened, and the nations echo round,
Shaken to their roots, as do the mountains now.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Prometheus Unbound
Our thoughts are like roots which reach out in every direction into the cosmic ocean of formless energy, and these thought-roots set in motion vibrations like themselves and attract the affinities of our desires and ambitions.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
The Miracle of Right Thought
Thoughts ... have tarried in my mind and peopled its inner chambers,
The sober children of reason, or desultory train of fancy.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.
LEV S. VYGOTSKY
Thought and Language
Nothing in this world requires such long seasoning and ripening as new thoughts.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Thought can wing its way
Swifter than lightning-flashes or the beam
That hastens on the pinions of the morn.
JAMES GATES PERCIVAL
"Sonnet", Clio
Thought is valuable in proportion as it is generative.
EDWARD BULWER LYTTON
Caxtoniana
It is not the man that gives me most of outward things that helps me to live; but the man who gives me thoughts and ideas by which a wider sweep of beauty opens to my vision, and kindles in my holy affections, by which I rise nearer to God.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Learning without thought is labor lost; and thought without learning is perilous.
CONFUCIUS
attributed, Day's Collacon