Quotes About Thought

when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

In order to eat, you have to be hungry. In order to learn, you have to be ignorant. Ignorance is a condition of learning. Pain is a condition of health. Passion is a condition of thought. Death is a condition of life.

Why is man man? As long as we have had minds to think with, stars to ponder upon, dreams to disturb us, curiosity to inspire us, hours free for meditation, words to place our thoughts in order, the question like a restless ghost has prowled the cellars of our consciousness.

Just as amino acids can be called the building blocks of life, associations can be called the building blocks of thought.49 In

stubborn consistency allows us a very appealing luxury: We don't have to think hard about the issues anymore.

Cuando tienes miedo no puedes pensar con claridad

the guiding factor in a decision is often not the one that counsels most wisely; it's one that has recently been brought to mind.

Most tellingly, it was a time when the ideas of William Graham Sumner, a professor of political and social science at Yale, dominated American social thought. Sumner brought Charles Darwin's thinking to America and twisted it into a theory to fit the times. Few Americans living today have read any of Sumner's writings, but they had an electrifying effect on America during the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

All my life I've wanted, just once, to say something clever without losing my train of thought.

Ever wonder what crime you committed that you are confined to a small enclosure above your sinuses, under permanent skull arrest?

If man were relieved of all superstition, and all prejudice, and had replaced these with a keen sensitivity to his real environment, and moreover had achieved a level of communication so simplified that one syllable could express his every thought, then he would have achieved the level of intelligence already achieved by his dog.

If I choose abstraction over reality, it is because I find it the lesser chaos.

When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?

An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns - but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver.

An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns - but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth.

Stung by the splendor of a sudden thought.

On a day like today I am stung by the splendor of a sudden thought.

Cogito ergo dim sum. (Therefore I think these are pork buns.)

creative output depends on creative input.

The moral of the story is simple: Test code is just as important as production code. It is not a second-class citizen. It requires thought, design, and care. It must be kept as clean as production code.

Test code is just as important as production code. It is not a second-class citizen. It requires thought, design, and care. It must be kept as clean as production code.

What is discontinuous in Hegel's text is not just the text itself, but the whole of human history, for it is Hegel who sees, or begins to see, that it is the process of thought that is everything; its results are only part of the process, and the final result—"the Absolute"—is an illusion.

The book was a pleasure to write, and I thought it both original and good, though what was original about it was not necessarily good, and what was good about it was not always original.

man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON