Quotes About Thought

But I shall give less thought to the future, I shall work in the present. I feel such work is within my power. For I only succeed in small things, and when I am tried by anxiety, I am bound to say it is the small joys that release me.

For those who have the habit of prayer, thought is too often a mere alibi, a sly way of deciding to do what one wants to do. Reason will always obscure what we wish to keep in the shadows. A worldling can think out the pros and cons and sum up his chances. No doubt. But what are our chances worth? We who have admitted once and for all into each moment of our puny lives the terrifying presence of God?...What is the use of working out chances? There are no chances against God.

She decided that her wisest course would be to put him out of her mind. After reaching this conclusion she lay thinking about him until at last she fell asleep.

Behavior is nothing more than a belated announcement of a previously accepted thought as one's own.

No one but a murderer would have thought of giving Gerry that albatross.

Well, they say trauma etches the neurons, and I was traumatized by my appalling behavior." Typical, Theo thought. He'd been accused, yet she was traumatized.

No one is more liable to make mistakes than the man who acts only on reflection.

Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibers, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself, and passion has its dreams.

The job of intellectuals is to come up with ideas, and all we've been producing is footnotes.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

The brain is the citadel of sense perception.

Leisure is the mother of philosophy.

By physical liberty I mean the right to do anything which does not interfere with the happiness of another. By intellectual liberty I mean the right to think wrong.

Give me the liberty to know, to think, to believe, and to utter freely according to conscience, above all other liberties.

Memory, of all the powers of the mind, is the most delicate and frail.

What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.

Music is a strange thing. I would almost say it is a miracle. For it stands halfway between thought and phenomenon, between spirit and matter.

Music is the art of thinking with sounds.

What a folly to dread the thought of throwing away life at once, and yet have no regard to throwing it away by parcels and piecemeal.

It is nonsense to say there is not enough time to be fully informed. ... Time given to thought is the greatest timesaver of all.

Leisure for reverie, gay or somber, does much to enrich life.

It is too bad if you have to do everything upon reflection and can't do anything from early habit.

Time is nothing absolute; its duration depends on the rate of thought and feeling.

An evening like this would be empty without some reference to [politics], so let's just think of this as empty.