Thought

"Sempre il miglior non è il parer primiero."

"Thought is something limitless and independent, and has been mixed with no thing but is alone by itself. … What was mingled with it would have prevented it from having power over anything in the way in which it does. … For it is the finest of all things and the purest."

"There are no dangerous thoughts, thinking itself is dangerous."

"The kings of modern thought are dumb."

""I exist" does not follow from "there is a thought now." The fact that a thought occurs at a given moment does not entail that any other thought has occurred at any other moment, still less that there has occurred a series of thoughts sufficient to constitute a single self. As Hume conclusively showed, no one event intrinsically points to any other. We infer the existence of events which we are not actually observing, with the help of general principle. But these principles must be obtained inductively. By mere deduction from what is immediately given we cannot advance a single step beyond. And, consequently, any attempt to base a deductive system on propositions which describe what is immediately given is bound to be a failure."

"Think about the great thinkers of our time and those times before and in antiquity. Think about Aristotle, Plato and Socrates and Maimonides and Pythagoras, Heraclitus and Rodin and George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Edison and Oprah Winfrey and those liberation thinkers like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and Marcus Garvey and Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela. Think about it my brothers and sisters, Cesar Chavez and George Washington Carver and Booker T Washington, Adam Clayton Powell ectera. Think about them! They were [thinkers]. Pitful our generation and our people today. Here it is 2008, and we're worse off now than we've ever been because our young people do not have the ability to — Think about it! How pitiful we are, here they are on drugs, on heroin, on cocaine, alcoholics. Here they are at the disposal of these kingpins and ectera, because they can't. Here they are making gangs families because they can't."

"Great thoughts, like great deeds, need No trumpet."

"Some days my thoughts are just cocoons—all cold, and dull, and blind, They hang from dripping branches in the gray woods of my mind;And other days they drift and shine—such free and flying things! I find the gold-dust in my hair, left by their brushing wings."

"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."

"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."

"That neither our Thoughts, nor Passions, nor Ideas formed by the Imagination, exist without the Mind, is what every Body will allow. And it seems no less evident that the various Sensations or Ideas imprinted on the Sense... cannot exist otherwise than in a Mind perceiving them... For as to what is said of the absolute Existence of unthinking Things without any relation to their being perceived, that seems perfectly unintelligible. Their Esse is Percipi, nor is it possible they should have any Existence, out of the Minds or thinking Things which perceive them."

"And thus daily, and month by month, and year by year, he will work at his mind, training it in these consecutive habits of thought, and he will learn to choose that of which he thinks; he will no longer allow thoughts to come and go; he will no longer permit a thought to grip him and hold him; he will no longer let a thought come into the mind and fix itself there and decline to be evicted; he will be master within his own house... he will say: “No; no such anxiety shall remain within my mind; no such thought shall have shelter within my mind; within this mind nothing stays that is not there by my choice and my invitation, and that which comes uninvited shall be turned outside the limits of my mind."

"Qui sait si l'on ne verra pas que le phosphore et l'esprit vont ensemble?"

"Sow a thought and reap an act."

"All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage… If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him."

"Thought is valuable in proportion as it is generative."

"The first thought is often the best."

"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."

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

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

"The power of Thought,—the magic of the Mind!"

"Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world?"

"Thought once awakened does not again slumber."

"My thoughts ran a wool-gathering."

"There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped."

"With curious art the brain, too finely wrought, Preys on herself, and is destroyed by thought."

"Cujusvis hominis est errare; nullius, nisi insipientis, in errore perseverare. Posteriores enim cogitationes (ut aiunt) sapientiores solent esse."

"Old things need not be therefore true, O brother men, nor yet the new; Ah! still awhile the old thought retain, And yet consider it again!"

"Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together Thoughts so all unlike each other; To mutter and mock a broken charm, To dally with wrong that does no harm."

"Reader! — You have been bred in a land abounding with men, able in arts, learning, and knowledges manifold, this man in one, this in another, few in many, none in all. But there is one art, of which every man should be'master, the art of reflection. If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all? In like manner, there is one knowledge, which it is every man's interest and duty to acquire, namely, self-knowledge: or to what end was man alone, of all animals, endued by the Creator with the faculty of self-consciousness?"

"The Master [Confucius] said, "If one learns from others but does not think, one is still at a loss. If, on the other hand, one thinks but does not learn from others, one is in peril.""

"Chi Wen Tzu always thought three times before taking action. When the Master was told of this, he commented, "Twice is quite enough.""

"The Master said, "I once spent all day thinking without taking food and all night thinking without going to bed, but I found that I gained nothing from it. It would have been better for me to have spent the time in learning.""

"In indolent vacuity of thought."

"So, to me how precious your thoughts are! O God, how much does the grand sum of them amount to! Were I to try to count them, they are more than even the grains of sand. I have awaked, and yet I am still with you."

"Chi poco pensa, molto erra."

"Je pense, donc je suis."

"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."

"Second thoughts, they say, are best."

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

"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."

"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."

"For thoughts are so great—aren't they, sir? They seem to lie upon us like a deep flood."

"Our growing thought Makes growing revelation."

"The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom."

"Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world, alters the world."

"Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world."

"Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first."

"The hardest thing in the world is to think, that is, to think real thought."

"Upon the cunning loom of thought We weave our fancies, so and so."