Quotes About Thought

Sydney Smith is often compared to Swift; but this only shows with how little thought our common criticism is written. The two men have really nothing in common, except that they were both high in the Church, and both wrote amusing letters about Ireland.

An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.

Directing was rarely a thought in my head growing up. Especially not when I first began acting or working on my first professional sets.

There is a difference between being bold and being rash.

Since coming back from overseas, this is more of a foreign country than the places overseas. I don't understand it. It's like America has lost faith in rational thought.

I find humanism to be the most rational and positive philosophy for life. And it's not a new thing at all - the history of humanist thought is deep and inspiring.

I guess law was always interesting to me because you deal with constants. I like to deal with constants, abstracts, constants and reason and ration, rational approaches to things. I don't know, I never really thought why I wanted to study law. But if you ask me whether I would do it again, absolutely.

The great advantage of being human is that we can employ rational thought and resolve to change our circumstances.

In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something.

I thought I was going to be a horror story writer. My influences were horror writers, like Rich Matheson, Ray Bradbury and Bram Stoker.

After a great deal of thought and discussions with my family, I have decided not to seek re-election in 2014. Politics shouldn't be a career, and I never intended to make it one.

If a man fights his way through his doubts to the conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord, he has attained to a certainty that the man who unthinkingly accepts things can never reach.

I don't react and think off emotions - that gets you in a bad situation.

The perceptive act is a reaction of the mind upon the object of which it is the perception.

It is not important for me as a writer that you leave a piece of writing of mine with either an agreement or even a resonance with what I have said. What is important is that you leave with the resonance of what you have felt and what you thought in reaction to that.

Aesthetics - rather than reason - shapes our thought processes. First comes aesthetics, then logic. 'Thinking in Numbers' is not about an attempt to impress the reader but to include the reader, draw the reader in, by explaining my experiences - the beauty I feel in a prime number, for example.

I've never thought about the ages of my readers.

My goal is to invite readers to think along with me and draw their own conclusions.

Provocative... I used to be defensive about it, but in the end, I realised it's exactly right. It's what we're trying to do - to provoke thought and discussion and, you know, shake people up to start thinking about things in a different way. I'm interested in messing with what they think is the norm.

Our 'realities' are make-believe - whatever we make ourselves believe, we experience.

Our intention creates our reality.

Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.

I knew right away that it was a gorgeous idea.

You gotta understand, 'Swingers' was a resume film for me. I never thought anybody would see the movie who I wasn't in the room with showing it to them.