thought

   Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.

—Connor, Sir William Neil pseudonym Cassandra

All thoughts, all passions, all delights Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame.

—Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

—Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert)

We live in oppressive times.We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder 'censorship', we call it 'concern for commercial viability'.

—Mamet, David Alan

   Yo persigo una forma que no encuentra mi estilo, boto¤  n de pensamiento que busca ser la rosa; se anuncia con un beso que en mis labios se posa al abrazo imposible de laVenus de Milo. I seek a form that my style cannot discover, a bud of thought that wants to be a rose; it is heralded by a kiss that is placed on my lips in the impossible embrace of theVenus de Milo.

—Dar|¤  o, Rube¤  n pseudonym of Fe¤  lixRube¤  nGarc|¤a Sarmiento

To love one maiden only, cleave to her, And worship her by years of noble deeds, Until they won her; for indeed I knew Of no more subtle master under heaven Than is the maiden passion for a maid, Not only to keep down the base in man, But teach high thought, and aimable words And courtliness, and the desire of fame, And love of truth, and all that makes man.

—Tennyson

   We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, Which we from time to time most grievouslyhave committed,By thought, word, and deed, Against thy Divine Majesty, Provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.

—Book of Common Prayer

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain'or 'train'do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance.It is nothing jointed; it flows. A'river'or a 'stream'are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.

—James,William

Sir Henry Wotton†was also a most dear lover, and a frequent practiser of the art of angling; of which he would say,'it was anemployment forhisidletime†a rest to his mind, a cheerer of his spirits, a diverter of sadness, a calmer of unquiet thoughts, a moderator of passions, a procurer of contentedness; and that it begat habits of peace and patience in those that professed and practised it.'

—Walton, Izaak

O fairest of creation, last and best Of all God's works, creature in whom excelled Whatever can to sight or thought be formed, Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet! How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost, Defaced, deflow'red, and now to death devote? Paradise Lost

—Milton,John

A word is the carving and colouring of a thought, and gives it permanence.

—Sitwell, Sir (Francis) Osbert

The people which ceases to care for its literary inheritance becomes barbaric; the people which ceases to produce literature ceases to move in thought and sensibility.

—Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)

Where God's presence is no longer a tenable proposition and where his absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable.

—Steiner, George

Les oeuvres les plus belles sont celles o  u' il y a le moins de matie'  re; plus l'expression se rapproche de la pense¤  e, plus le mot colle dessus et dispara|"t, plus c'est beau. Je crois que l'avenir de l'art est dans ces voies. The most beautiful works are those that have the least content; the closer the expression is to the thought, the more indistinguishable the word from the content, the more beautiful is the work. I believe that the future of art lies in this direction.

—Flaubert, Gustave

One friend in a lifetime ismuch; two are many; three are hardly possible.Friendship needs a certainparallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

—Adams, Henry Brooks

The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man's attaining to a higher eminence in whatever he takes up, than can womanöwhether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands.

—Darwin, Charles Robert

The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment.We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.

—Havel,Va¤  clav

Expression is the dress of thought.

—Pope, Alexander

The end of man is an action and not a thought, though it were the noblest.

—Carlyle,Thomas

It must be soöPlato, thou reason'st well!ö Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, This longing after immortality? Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror, Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul Back on herself, and startles at destruction 'Tis the divinity that stirs within us; 'Tis heaven itself, that points out an hereafter, And intimates eternity to man. Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought!

—Addison,Joseph

Wisdom and Spirit of the universe! Thou soul, that art the eternity of thought, And giv'st to forms and images a breath And everlasting motion.

—Wordsworth,William

Experience is the child of Thought, and Thought is the child of Action.We cannot learn men from books.

—Disraeli, Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

   Id quo maius non cogitari potest. That than which a greater cannot be thought.

—St Anselm

What is to prevent a daily newspaper from being made the greatest organ of social life? Books have had their dayöthe theatres have had their dayöthe temple of religion has had its day. A newspaper can be made to take the lead of all these in the great movements of human thought and of human civilisation. A newspaper can send more souls to Heaven, and save more from Hell, than all the churches or chapels in New Yorköbesides making money at the same time.

—Bennett,James Gordon, Snr

   Those who have the habit of revelation lose the habit of thought.

—Skelton, Robin

Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writerenters intoa structure of traditional stories and images.

—Frye, Northrop

   The people of the United States are drawn from many nations, and chiefly from the nations now at war. Some will wish one nation, others another, to succeed in this monumental struggle. I venture to speak a solemn word of warning. The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men's souls.We must be impartial in thought as well as in action.

—Wilson, (Thomas) Woodrow

It is not in the outward and visible world of material life that the Celtic genius of Wales or Ireland can at this day hope to count for much; it is in the inward world of thought and science.What it has been, what is has done, what it will be or will do, as a matter of modern politics.

—Arnold, Matthew

Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.

—Carlyle,Thomas

Our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought.

—Bunting, Basil

Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.

—Orwell, George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair

Like a Poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.

—Shelley, Percy Bysshe

My whole life have I lived in pleasant thought, As if life's business were a summer mood; As if all needful things would come unsought To genial faith, still rich in genial good.

—Wordsworth,William

Three poets, in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. The first in loftiness of thought surpassed, The next in majesty, in both the last: The force of Nature could no farther go; To make a third, she joined the former two.

—Dryden,John

   Unto the man of yearning thought And aspiration, to do nought Is in itself almost an act.

—Rossetti, Dante Gabriel

The quick Dreams, The passion-winged Ministers of thought.

—Shelley, Percy Bysshe

King of comforts, King of life, Thou hast cheered me, And when fears and doubts were rife, Thou hast cleared me. Not a hook in all my breast But thou fill'st it, Not a thought in all my rest But thou kill'st it. Wherefore with my utmost strength I will praise thee, And as thou giv'st line, and length, I will raise thee.

—Vaughan, Henry

'To beginwith,' hesaid heavily,'you've gottounderstand that a seagull is an unlimited idea of freedom, an image of the Great Gull, and your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is nothing more than your thought itself.'

—Bach, Richard

   It is not the constant thought of their sins, but the vision of the holiness of God that makes the saints aware of their own sinfulness.

—Sourozh

An odd thought strikes me:öwe shall receive no letters in the grave.

—Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson

What was once thought can never be unthought.

—Du« r renmatt, Friedrich

Le vers est la forme optique de la pense¤  e.Voila'   pourquoi il convient surtout a'   la perspective sce¤  nique. Verse is the optical form of thought. That is the reason a scenic perspective suits it.

—Hugo,Victor Marie

  Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not possibly have met.

—Lebowitz, Fran(ces Ann)

Perish the thought!

—Cibber, Colley

None are so desolate but something dear, Dearer than self, possesses or possessed A thought, and claims the homage of a tear.

—Rochdale

It would be a curious reading of the history of thought to suggest that the absence of disagreement testifies to a developing discipline.

—Merton, Robert King

Delightful task! to rear the tender thought, To teach the young idea how to shoot.

—Thomson,James pseudonym 'BV',ByssheVanolis

The revelation of Thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

—Emerson, RalphWaldo

O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!

—Keats,John

Tout est dit, et l'on vient trop tard depuis plus de sept mille ans qu'il y a des hommes et qui pensent. Everything has been said. After seven thousand years of human thought, we have come too late.

—La Bruye'  re,Jean de

So that in the end there were the trees. The boy walking through them with his head drooping as he increased in stature. Putting out shoots of green thought. So that, in the end, there was no end.

—White, Patrick Victor Martindale

When you come to the end of a perfect day, And you sit alone with your thought, While the chimes ring out with a carol gay For the joy that the day has brought, Do you think what the end of a perfect day Can mean to a tired heart, When the sun goes down with a flaming ray, And the dear friends have to part?

—Bond, CarrieJacobs

Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?

—Russell, Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl

We look before and after, And pine for what is not: Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught: Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

—Shelley, Percy Bysshe

A single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought.

—Shelley, Percy Bysshe

He gave man speech, and speech created thought, Which is the measure of the universe.

—Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.

—Browning, Robert

From my pillow, looking forth by light Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold The antechapel where the statue stood Of Newton with his prism and silent face, The marble index of a mind for ever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought alone. 925

—Wordsworth,William

The artist should fear to become the slave of detail. He should strive to express his thought and not the surface of it.What avails a storm cloud accurate in form and colour if the storm is not therein?

—Ryder, Albert Pinkham

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

—Keats,John

Le temps vole et m'emporte malgre¤   moi; j'ai beau vouloir le retenir, c'est lui qui m'entra|"ne; et cette pense¤  e me fait grande peur: vous devinez a'   peu pre'  s pourquoi. Time flies and takes me with it despite my efforts; I'd like to hold it back, but it keeps dragging me along and this thought frightens me greatly: you can perhaps guess why.

—Se¤  vigne¤  , Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de

I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.

—Arnold, Matthew

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

—Holmes, Oliver Wendell

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slipperyand thought is viscous.

—Adams, Henry Brooks

I can't see that she could have found anything nastier to say if she'd thought it out with both hands fora fortnight.

—Sayers, Dorothy L(eigh)

They swayed about upon a rocking horse, And thought it Pegasus.

—Keats,John

Mathematics is thought moving in the sphere of complete abstraction from any particular instance of what it is talking about.

—Whitehead, Alfred North

Alles Gescheite ist schon gedacht worden; man muss nur versuchen, es noch einmal zu denken. Everything clever has been thought of before.We must try to think it again.

—Goethe,JohannWolfgang von

When you notice a cat in profound meditation The reason, I tell you, is always the same: His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name: His ineffable effable Effanineffable Deep and inscrutable singular name.

—Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)

Father in Heaven, whenthethoughtof Thee wakesinour hearts, let it not awaken like a frightened bird that flies about in dismay, but like a child waking from its sleep with a heavenly smile.

—Kierkegaard, So«  ren Aabye

Ein einziger dankbarer Gedanke gen Himmel ist das vollkommenste Gebet. One single grateful thought raised to heaven is the most perfect prayer.

—Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim

The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.

—Lippmann,Walter

Thought shall be the harder, heart the keener, courage the greater, as our might lessens.

—Anonymous

And Thought leapt out to wed withThought EreThought could wed itself with Speech.

—Tennyson

To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were only capable of staying awake long enough to let the idea soak in.

—Miller, Henry Valentine

Il n'y a qu'un journal qui puisse venir de¤  poser au me"  me moment dans mille esprits la me"  me pense¤  e. Only a newspaper can place at the same time in a thousand minds the same thought.

—Tocqueville, Alexis Charles Henri Cle¤  rel de

[a character in Mr Puff's play within a play,'The Spanish Armanda'] Perdition catch my soul but I do love thee. : Haven't I heard that line before? : No, I fancy not.öWhere pray? :Yes, I think there is something like it in Othello. : Gad! now you put me in mind on't, I believe there isöbut that's of no consequence; all that can be said is, that two people happened to hit upon the same thoughtöand Shakespeare made use of it first, that's all.

—Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

The function of music isto release us from the tyranny of conscious thought.

—Beecham, SirThomas

O L, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo,O L, thou knowest it altogether. Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it.

—Bible (Old Testament)

I know not how it wasöbut, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit† There was aniciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heartöan unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.

—Poe, EdgarAllan

Thisgrey spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

—Tennyson

   We agreed that the novel is absolutely the only vehicle for the thought of our day.

—Ford, Ford Madox originally Ford Hermann Hueffer

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought, So the darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing.

—Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)

And what you thought you came for Is onlya shell, a husk of meaning From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled If at all. Either you had no purpose Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured And is altered in fulfilment.

—Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)

He trudged along unknowing what he sought, And whistled as he went, for want of thought.

—Dryden,John

I am imbued with two deep impressions; the first, that science knows no country; the second, which seems to contradict the first, although it is really a direct consequence of it†that science is the highest personification of the nation. Science knows no country because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.

—Pasteur, Louis

   To be able to be caught up into the world of thoughtöthat is educated.

—Hamilton, Edith

But evil is wrought by want of thought, As well as want of heart!

—Honorius of Autun