thought

"So here is your definition of thinking. It is the manipulation of memories."

"Error is popular because people are afraid to grow up. Clear thinking means facing the fact that life is full of difficult problems, that we cannot escape from pain, discomfort and uncertainty, that we cannot obtain happiness by turning away from reality. As Sigmund Freud said, we need "education to reality.""

"Our first principles, our basic ideas, are those most intimately tied up with our personality, with the emotional make-up we have inherited or acquired. Detached, impersonal thinking is almost impossible; it hardly ever happens."

"I'll put that in my considering cap."

"We must free ourselves from the sacralization of the social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and human relations as thought."

"The best that we can do for one another is to exchange our thoughts freely; and that, after all, is but little."

"Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies."

"People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things."

"We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think."

"The Lecturers appointed shall be subjected to no test of any kind, and may be of any denomination, or of any religion or way of thinking, or as is sometimes said, they may be of no religion, or they may be so-called sceptics or agnostics or free-thinkers, provided only that they be reverent men, true thinkers, sincere lovers of and earnest enquirers after truth."

"Every thought willingly contemplated, ever word meaningly spoken, every action freely done, consolidates itself in the character, and will project itself onward in a permanent continuity."

"[Steven Spielberg's films] are comforting, they always give you answers and I don't think they're very clever answers. … The success of most Hollywood films these days is down to fact that they're comforting. They tie things up in nice little bows and give you answers, even if the answers are stupid, you go home and you don't have to think about it. … The great filmmakers make you go home and think about it."

"Those who refuse the long drudgery of thought, and think with the heart rather than with the head, are ever the most fiercely dogmatic in their tone."

"However closely we may associate thought with the physical machinery of the brain, the connection is dropped as irrelevant as soon as we consider the fundamental property of thought—that it may be correct or incorrect. ...that involves recognising a domain of the other type of law—laws which ought to be kept, but may be broken."

"No matter how much you think, you won’t know. Only when you stop thinking will you know. But still, you have to depend on thinking so as to know."

"Whatsoe'er thy birth, Thou wert a beautiful thought and softly bodied forth."

"He trudg'd along, unknowing what he sought, And whistled as he went, for want of thought."

"Second thoughts, they say, are best."

"I stood Among them, but not of them: in a shroud Of thoughts which were not their thoughts."

"The immense majority of individuals, not only among the ignorant masses but also among the civilized and privileged classes, think and want only what everybody else around them thinks and wants. They doubtlessly believe that they think for themselves, but they are only slavishly repeating by rote, with slight modifications, the thoughts and aims of the other conformists which they imperceptibly absorb. This servility, this routine, this perennial absence of the will to revolt and this lack of initiative and independence of thought are the principle causes for the slow, desolate historical development of humanity."

"The kings of modern thought are dumb."

"The ground or basis for a belief is deliberately sought and its adequacy to support the belief examined. This process is called reflective thought: it alone is truly educative in value, and it forms accordingly the principal subject of this volume."

"Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. … The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying."

"Our thoughts by ancient thinkers are controll'd, And many a word in which our thoughts are told Was coin'd long since in regions far away."

"Je pense, donc je suis."

"What exile from himself can flee? To zones, though more and more remote, Still, still pursues, where'er I be, The blight of life—the demon Thought."

"My thoughts and I were of another world."

"That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one."

"Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!"

"Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose, Flushing his brow."

"All of this may seem pretty obvious when you step back and think about it, but most people don’t step back and think about it."

"All existential problems are passionate problems, for when existence is interpenetrated with reflection, it generates passion. To think about existential problems in such a way as to leave out the passion is tantamount to not thinking about them at all, since it is to forget the point, which is that the thinker himself is an existing individual."

"The history of human thought recalls the swinging of a pendulum which takes centuries to swing. After a long period of slumber comes a moment of awakening. Then thought frees herself from the chains with which those interested — rulers, lawyers, clerics — have carefully enwound her. She shatters the chains. She subjects to severe criticism all that has been taught her, and lays bare the emptiness of the religious, political, legal, and social prejudices amid which she has vegetated. She starts research in new paths, enriches our knowledge with new discoveries, creates new sciences."

"It is amazing how much a thought expands and refines by being put into speech: I should think it could hardly know itself."

"[T]hought is so little incompatible with organized matter, that it seems to be one of its properties on a par with electricity, the faculty of motion, impenetrability, extentension, etc."

"Where all think alike, no one thinks very much."

"The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have, and therefore should be secured, because they seldom return again."

"A thought often makes us hotter than a fire."

"The surest pledge of a deathless name Is the silent homage of thoughts unspoken."

"My own thoughts Are my companions."

"Thoughts so sudden, that they seem The revelations of a dream."

"All thoughts that mould the age begin Deep down within the primitive soul."

"A penny for your thought."

"In class society, everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class."

"Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade."

"No brain is stronger than its weakest think."

"Grand Thoughts that never can be wearied out, Showing the unreality of Time."

"Thoughts that voluntary move Harmonious numbers."

"A century ago, we had essentially no way to start to explain how thinking works. Then psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget produced their theories about child development. Somewhat later, on the mechanical side, mathematicians like Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing began to reveal the hitherto unknown range of what machines could be made to do. These two streams of thought began to merge only in the 1940s, when Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts began to show how machines might be made to see, reason, and remember. Research in the modern science of Artificial Intelligence started only in the 1950's, stimulated by the invention of modern computers. This inspired a flood of new ideas about how machines could do what only minds had done previously."

"When our thoughts are born, Though they be good and humble, one should mind How they are reared, or some will go astray And shame their mother."