Thought

"Be not troubled by the wanderings of your imagination which you cannot restrain. How often do we wander through the fear of wandering and the regret that we have done so. What would you say of a traveler who, instead of constantly advancing in his journey, should employ his time in anticipating the falls he might suffer, or in weeping over the place where one had happened?"

"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."

"Wer kann was Dummes, wer was Kluges denken, Das nicht die Vorwelt schon gedacht."

"Those who think must govern those that toil."

"Thoughts that breathe and words that burn."

"Their own second and sober thoughts."

"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking — there's the real danger."

"I say that conceit is just as natural a thing to human minds as a centre is to a circle. But little-minded people's thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes' conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve. An arc in the movement of a large intellect does not sensibly differ from a straight line. Even if it have the third vowel ['I', the first-person pronoun] as its centre, it does not soon betray it. The highest thought, that is, is the most seemingly impersonal; it does not obviously imply any individual centre."

"A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times."

"Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?"

"Every man who speaks out loud and clear is tinting the "Zeitgeist." Every man who expresses what he honestly thinks is true is changing the Spirit of the Times. Thinkers help other people to think, for they formulate what others are thinking. No person writes or thinks alone—thought is in the air, but its expression is necessary to create a tangible Spirit of the Times."

"Descartes was far more subtle about mind-and-body interactions than many crude commentators admit, but he was right that thoughts don't seem to take up any room, not even in one's head. What are they? No one knows. No one really knows what a thought is. It must involve the chemicals and the synapses, of course, but how do the words and pictures come into it?"

"Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."