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Quotations about thought
Note that not all quotations have been tagged, so the Search function may find additional quotations on this topic.
Indignation is the seducer of thought. No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.
Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.
Marcus Aurelius (121-180) Roman emperor (161-180), Stoic philosopher
Meditations, Book 5, #16
Alt. trans.:
- "Your mind will be like its habitual thoughts; for the soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts."
- "Whatever kind of impressions you receive most often, so too will be your mind, for the soul is dyed with the color of one's impressions." [tr. Needleman & Piazza (2008)]
- "Your manners will depend very much upon the quality of what you frequently think on; for the soul is as it were tinged with the color and complexion of thought." [tr. Collier (1887)]
The last clause is also frequently attributed to William Ralph Inge, who likely used it in an essay.
Ideas come when we do not expect them, and not when we are brooding and searching at our desks. Yet ideas would certainly not come to mind had we not brooded at our desks and searched for answers with passionate devotion.
Max Weber (1864-1920) German sociologist, philosopher, political economist [Maximilian Karl Emil Weber]
“Science as a Vocation [Wissenscahft als Beruf],” Speech, Munich University (1918) [tr. Gerth & Mills (1948)]
(Source)
Alt. trans.:
- "Ideas come when they are least expected, rather than while you are racking your brains at your desk. But, by the same token, they would not have made their appearance if we had not spent many hours pondering at our desks or brooding passionately over the problems facing us." [tr. Livingstone]
- "[Ideas] come, at any rate, when one does not expect them, not while racking one's brains and pondering at one's desk. Of course, the ideas would not have occurred to us without our having been through the state of racking our brains and being engaged in impassioned questioning." [tr. Wells (2018)]
That is the whole trouble with being a heretic. One must usually think out everything for oneself.
As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking.
William Godwin (1756-1836) English journalist, political philosopher, novelist
The Enquirer, Essay 15 “Of Choice in Reading” (1797)
(Source)
I miss what I had in terms of the speed of memory access. If I needed a word or a fact it was already at my fingertips and now it’s like an arthritic and elderly gentleman has to sit up and go down many, many flights of stairs very slowly and go and rummage in dusty drawers. Eventually he will return four days later, normally at about 1:30 in the morning, and I will sit up and go, “Oh yes! ‘Crepuscular.’ That was the word I was looking for.”
The proper method for hastening the decay of error is not by brute force, or by regulation which is one of the classes of force, to endeavor to reduce men to intellectual uniformity, but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself.
William Godwin (1756-1836) English journalist, political philosopher, novelist
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Vol. 2, bk. 8, ch. 6 “Of the Enjoyment of Liberty” (1793)
(Source)
Truth is compar’d in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetuall progression, they sick’n into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.
[Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.]
Thought is sad without action, and action is sad without thought.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821-1881) Swiss philosopher, poet, critic
Journal (2nd Ed.,1889)
(Source)
Quoted in Cesare Lombroso, The Man of Genius (1896),
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
George Orwell (1903-1950) English writer [pseud. of Eric Arthur Blair]
“Politics and the English Language,” Horizon (Apr 1946)
(Source)
Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007) American historian, author, social critic
Interview with Brian Lamb, C-SPAN (10 May 1998)
I’m thinking on the fly, here. (Although now that I’m in middle management I think I’m supposed to call it “refactoring the strategic value proposition in real time with agile implementation,” or, if I’m being honest, “making it up as I go along.”)
Charles "Charlie" Stross (b. 1964) British writer
The Apocalypse Codex (2012)
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
Henry Adams (1838-1918) American journalist, historian, academic, novelist
The Education of Henry Adams, ch. 31 (1907)
Value of a Journal. A sentence now; a sentence last year; a sentence yesterday. Tomorrow a question comes that for the first time brings together these three and shows them to be the three fractions of Unit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, poet
“Notebook Delta” (1837-1862)
Sometimes I don’t know if my life is complicated, or if it’s that I just think too much about things.
John Scalzi (b. 1969) American writer
Zoe’s Tale (2008)
The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, poet
Letters and Social Aims, “Quotation and Originality” (1876)
Observe the invincible tendency of the mind to unify. It is a law of our constitution that we should not contemplate things apart without the effort to arrange them in order with known facts and ascribe them to the same law.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, poet
Journal (1836)
Let us tenderly and kindly cherish therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak and write.
John Adams (1735-1826) American lawyer, Founding Father, statesman, US President (1797-1801)
“A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law” (1765)
You can’t help but try and follow an animal’s thought processes, and you can’t help, when faced with an animal like a three ton rhinoceros with nasal passages bigger than its brain, but fail.
Douglas Adams (1952-2001) English writer
Last Chance to See, ch. 3 (1990)
We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.
William Hazlitt (1778-1830) English writer
Men and Manners, “On Prejudice” (1852)
It is infinitely difficult to know when and where one should stop, and for all but one in thousands the goal of their thinking is the point at which they have become tired of thinking.
[Es ist unendlich schwer, zu wissen, wenn und wo man bleiben soll, und Tausenden für einen ist das Ziel ihres Nachdenkens die Stelle, wo sie des Nachdenkens müde geworden.]
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) German playwright, philosopher, dramiturg, writer
Letter to Moses Mendelssohn (9 Jan 1771)
The firefly only shines when on the wing.
So is it with the mind — when once we rest
We darken.Philip James Bailey (1816-1902) English poet
Festus (1839)
‘Tis the hardest thing in the world to be a good Thinker, without being a strong Self-Examiner.
Anthony Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) English politician and philosopher
Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Vol. 1, “Soliloquy: or Advice to an Author” (1711)
Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.
Victor Hugo (1802-1885) French writer
Postscriptum de Ma Vie [Victor Hugo’s Intellectual Autobiography] (1907) [tr. O’Rourke]
(Source)
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) English modernist writer [b. Adeline Virginia Stephen]
A Room of One’s Own, ch. 4 (1929)
As soon as a true thought has entered our mind, it gives a light which makes us see a crowd of other objects which we have never perceived before.
[Aussitôt qu’une pensée vraie est entrée dans notre esprit, elle jette une lumière qui nous fait voir une foule d’autres objets que nous n’apercevions pas auparavant.]
François-René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848) French writer, politican, diplomat
“Pensées, Réflexions et Maximes,” Complete Works of Chateaubriand [Oeuvres Illustrées de Chateaubriand], Vol. 3, sec. 7 (1852)
(Source)
A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them.
Rex Stout (1886-1975) American writer
In “Author Rex Stout vs. the FBI,” Interview with Sandra Schmidt, Life (10 Dec 1965)
Misery is almost always the result of thinking.
Joseph Joubert (1754-1824) French moralist
Pensées (1838) [ed. Auster (1983)]
Orthodoxy:
- In religion, that state of mind which congratulates itself on being absolutely right, and a belief that all who think otherwise are wholly wrong.
- A faith in the fixed — a worship of the static.
- The joy that comes from thinking that most everybody is lined up for Limbus with no return ticket.
- A condition brought about by the sprites of Humor, according to the rule that whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.
- The zenith of selfishness and the nadir of egotism.
- Mephisto with a lily in his hand.
- A corpse that does not know it is dead.
- Spiritual constipation.
- That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea or absorb a new one.
Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) American writer, businessman, philosopher
The Roycroft Dictionary (1914)
(Source)
The question is: Bad as I am, have I the right to think? And I think I have for two reasons: First, I cannot help it. And secondly, I like it.
Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) American lawyer, agnostic, orator
“What Must We Do To Be Saved?” Sec. 1 (1880)
(Source)
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye. We are active; and indeed we know, as something more than a symbolic accident in the evolution of man, that it is the hand that drives the subsequent evolution of the brain. We find tools today made by man before he became man. Benjamin Franklin in 1778 called man “a tool-making animal,” and that is right.
Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974) Polish-English humanist and mathematician
The Ascent of Man, ch. 3 (1973)
The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and to his fellow-men.
Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) American lawyer, agnostic, orator
“The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child” (1877)
(Source)
Why should man be afraid to think, and why should he fear to express his thoughts? Is it possible that an infinite Deity is unwilling that a man should investigate the phenomena by which he is surrounded? Is it possible that a god delights in threatening and terrifying men? What glory, what honor and renown a god must win on such a field! The ocean raving at a drop; a star envious of a candle; the sun jealous of a fire-fly.
Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) American lawyer, agnostic, orator
“Heretics and Heresies” (1874)
(Source)
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.
René Descartes (1596-1650) French philosopher, mathematician
Discourse on Method [Discours de la méthode] (1637)
The limits of my language mark the limits of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) Austrian-English philosopher
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.6 (1921)
Alt. trans:
- "The boundary of my language is the boundary of my world." [tr. Kolak]
- "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." [tr. Pears and McGuinness]
- "The limits of my language stand for the limits of my world."
Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt.
Bergen Evans (1904-1978) American educator, writer, lexicographer
The Natural History of Nonsense, ch. 19 (1946)
It saddens me that literacy has become suspect, and degraded, given how many millions of years of evolution spent developing the ability to create language. The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language. The less precise the usage, the less clear the process of language, the less you can achieve what you want to achieve when you open you mouth to say something. We have slowly bastardized and degraded and weakened the language, abetted and abided by a growing cultural disdain for literacy, a cyclical trend toward anti-intellectualism.
J. Michael (Joe) Straczynski (b. 1954) American screenwriter, producer, author [a/k/a "JMS"]
rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated, “ATTN JMS: Influences?” (27 Oct 1995)
(Source)
BRAIN, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think.
In the practice of art, as well as in morals, it is necessary to keep a watchful and jealous eye over ourselves; idleness, assuming the specious disguise of industry, will lull to sleep all suspicion of our want of an active exertion of strength. A provision of endless apparatus, a bustle of infinite enquiry and research, or even the mere mechanical labour of copying, may be employed, to evade and shuffle off real labour, — the real labour of thinking.
Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) British painter, critic
Speech to the Royal Academy, London (10 Dec 1784)
(Source)
Paraphrased over a long period of time (and still attributed to Reynolds) as: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking."
The lecture was later described as the Twelfth Discourse in a 1797 collection of Reynolds' works.
Often attributed to Thomas Edison. More information here.
Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.
[La pensée est le labeur de l’intelligence, la rêverie en est la volupté.]
Victor Hugo (1802-1885) French writer
Les Misérables, Vol. 4 “St. Denis,” Book 2 “Eponine,” ch. 1 “The Field of the Lark” (1862) [tr. Wilbour]
Alt trans. [Denny (1980)]: "Thought is the work of the intellect, reveries its self-indulgence." Cited as Part IV, ch. 2 "Eponine."
