quotations about thought
Great thoughts come from the heart.
LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES
Reflections and Maxims
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
Thought and action should be one.
GEBHARD LEBRECHT VON BLUCHER
attributed, Day's Collacon
A person is limited only by the thoughts that he chooses.
JAMES ALLEN
As a Man Thinketh
Action helps thought, and thought helps action. By action thought is rendered more masculine, attains to greater breadth, and acquires a certain nobleness and dignity. Thanks to thought, action may become more definite, more precise, more fruitful.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Food for thought gives some folks indigestion.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
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
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
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
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 him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
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 profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Myth of Sisyphus
Nothing in this world requires such long seasoning and ripening as new thoughts.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
Learning without thought is labor lost; and thought without learning is perilous.
CONFUCIUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
Each flying thought, a flying thought pursues.
C. B. LANGSTON
"Thought"
With curious art the brain, too finely wrought,
Preys on herself, and is destroyed by thought.
CHARLES CHURCHILL
Epistle to William Hogarth