Quotes About Thought

These statements of belief are consonant with the assumption of pluralist thought that if people do not exclusively identify themselves with a single category—such as class, occupation, or system of belief—political cleavages will be limited in intensity.

For suddenly it had changed into that gear when time is slower - as when, falling off a ladder, one has time to think: I shall land so, just there, and I must turn in the air slightly... All this in a space of time normally too short for any thought at all. But we are wrong in dividing the mind's machinery from time: they are the same. It is only in such sharp emphatic moments that we recognize this fact.

Literature and history, these two great branches of human learning, records of human behvaiour, human thought, are less and less valued by the young, and by educators, too. Yet from them one may learn how to be a citizen and a human being. We may learn how to look at ourselves and at the society we live in, in that calm, cool, critical and sceptical way which is the only possible stance for a civilized human being, or so have said all the philosophers and the sages.

I sense myself, I think of myself; and as I do this I dissolve, go away, am left with nothing, nothing, nothing - unless I am the wind that blows through the immense spaces that lie between electron and electron, proton and its attendants, spaces that cannot be filled with 'nothing', since nothing is 'nothing'... (84)

He didn't consciously bring Brub to memory. It was one of those minnows of thought, darting through the unruffled pond of his thinking.

I hope the string and clapper arrangement he calls a mind has been permanently put out of action.

Faith, thought O'LiamRoe. And not a decent creature among them thought to say that the only rule in it is for a man to have a fine, steady seat for an elephant.

How nice," said Lymond, "to have simple emotions. No trouble with principles; no independence of thought; no resistance to suggestion; no nonsense about adult behaviour when it comes to one's own amour propre.

Jerott thought, acidly, that a slip of that dagger, if it happened, would save Francis Crawford a large sum of money.

Should. Ought. Scenarios again, she thought crossly, which was how the mind persistently worked, using facts and assumptions left over from the past to draw conclusions that were frequently in error.

I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar. It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid.

in the first part, the master-faculties are Observation and Memory, so in the second, the master-faculty is the Discursive Reason.

Unless we do change our whole way of thought about work, I do not think we shall ever escape from the appalling squirrel cage of economic confusion in which we have been madly turning for the last three centuries or so, the cage in which we landed ourselves by acquiescing in a social system based upon Envy and Avarice.

And heresy is, as I have tried to show, largely the expression of opinion of the untutored average man, trying to grapple with the problems of the universe at the point where they begin to interfere with daily life and thought.

The Answer to the Great Question... Of Life, the Universe and Everything... Is... Forty-two,' said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Exactly! said Deep Thought. So once you do know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means.

Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

The mere thought hadn't even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.

Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

You'll have a national Philosopher's strike on your hands!

Where do you get the inspiration for your books? I tell myself I can't have another cup of coffee till I've thought of an idea.

No, said Arthur, no, he added thoughtfully. No, he added again, even more thoughtfully. What? he said at last.

The Book: Curiously the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias, as it fell, was, 'Oh no, not again.' Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly *why* the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.

The mere thought, growled Mr Prosser, hadn't even begun to speculate, he continued, settling himself back, about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.