Quotes About Thought

When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the "meaning" of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not in abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.

The dissolving power of conversation. One realizes why both meditation and action require silence.

Naprzeciwko czÅ'owieka abstrakcyjnego, który myÅ›li dla przyjemnoÅ›ci myÅ›lenia, staje czÅ'owiek organiczny, myÅ›lÄ…cy pod naciskiem ?yciowej nierównowagi, znajdujÄ…cy siÄ™ poza dziedzinami nauki i sztuki. Podoba mi siÄ™ myÅ›lenie zachowujÄ…ce jeszcze woÅ" krwi i ciaÅ'a; od pustej abstrakcji tysiÄ…c razy wolÄ™ refleksjÄ™ wybÅ'yskujÄ…cÄ… z pÅ'ciowego roznamiÄ™tnienia lub z nerwowej depresji.

If, as we grow older, we scrutinize our own past at the expense of 'problems', it is simply because we handle memories more readily than ideas.

Whenever philosophers insinuate themselves into Letters, it is to exploit their confusion or to precipitate their collapse.

How easy it is to believe yourself a god by the heart, and how hard it is to be one by the mind!

What is known as "wisdom" is ultimately only a perpetual "thinking it over," i.e., non-action as first impulse.

Not to have been born, merely musing on that—what happiness, what freedom, what space!

Le degré d'adversité dans lequel nous vivons peut être jugé selon le rôle que joue le soleil dans nos préoccupations, selon notre ingratitude. Car nous commençons à penser à partir du moment où nous ne montrons plus la moindre reconnaissance envers lui.

Philosophy is taught only in the agora, in a garden, or at home. The lecture chair is the grave of philosophy, the death of any living thought, the dais is the mind in mourning.

Amid anxiety and distress, sudden calm at the thought of the foetus one has been.

Nihil est in intellectu quod non ante fuerit in sensu

Just as reflection disappears to the extent that thought and action take the form of automatic habits, it awakes only when accepted habits become disorganized.

A Shade upon the mind there passesAs when on NoonA Cloud the mighty Sun encloses.

The persistence of this imagery calls to mind what Ludwik Fleck termed 'the self-contained' nature of scientific thought. As he described it, 'the interaction between what is already known, what remains to be learned, and those who are to apprehend it, go to ensure harmony within the system. But at the same time they also preserve the harmony of illusions, which is quite secure within the confines of a given thought style.

The old excitement of thought has half died out, or rather it is diffused in quiet pleasure over a life instead of being concentrated in intense and eager spasms.

I have known a man who did not know what color his sister's eyes were, though he had seen her every day for twenty years; or rather, he did not know because he had so seen her: so true is the philosophical maxim that we neglect the constant element in our thoughts, though it is probably the most important, and attend almost only to the varying elements—the differentiating elements (as men now speak)—though they are apt to be less potent.

Imagination is the air of mind.

When Jesus said, `I am the door,' He meant that the I AM in each soul is the door through which the life, power, and substance of the great I AM, which is God, comes forth into expression through the individual. This I AM has but one mode of expression and that is through idea, thought, word, and act.

Indeed there must have been a very deep-seated dissatisfaction with life, a very intense thirst of heart, and an almost absolute poverty of thought, to secure the acceptance of the Christian absurdity, the most audacious and monstrous of all religious absurdities.

Three elements or, if you like, three fundamental principles constitute the essential conditions of all human development, collective or individual, in history: (1) human animality; (2) thought; and (3) rebellion. To the first properly corresponds social and private economy; to the second, science; to the third, liberty.

In the historic movements of scientific thought I see, or think I see, drifts and currents such as astronomers detect among the stars of heaven.

What is a feeling if not a world in a whole thought?

The word love, when applied to the reproduction of the species, is the most hateful blasphemy which modern manners have taught us to utter. Nature, in raising us above the beasts by the divine gift of thought, had rendered us very sensitive to bodily sensations, emotional sentiment, cravings of appetite and passions. This double nature of ours makes of man both an animal and a lover.