Quotes About Thought

Negativity is often looked upon [in the USA] as a kind of thought crime. Not since the advent of socialist realism has the world witnessed such pathological upbeatness.

No matter where you go or what you do, you live your entire life within the confines of your head.

He eyed Margaret with resentment; covertly; with suspicion. A womb (unpleasant thought!). She had never told him she possessed one. Was that where women went and sat, to brood, to count their injuries? Miles vaguely hated her.

There is a vast difference between academic thought and intelligence. Academic thought can only function within the context of separativeness, whilst intelligence is a spontaneous co-operation with the fundamental wholeness that is inherent within the process of life.

The highest form of consciousness is self consciousness

The thought manifests as the word; The word manifests as the deed; The deed develops into habit; And habit hardens into character. So watch the thought and its ways with care, And let it spring from love Born out of concern for all beings.

You have the right to free speech, as long as you're not dumb enough to actually try it.

Clarity of writing usually follows clarity of thought. So think what you want to say, then say it as simply as possible.

Somebody who thinks logically is a nice contrast to the real world

A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.

On the way from mythology to logistics thought has lost the element of self-reflection and today machinery disables men even as it nurtures them.

Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.

Thought as such ... is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it.

Both forms of consciousness, the one that bows before the facts and the other that mistakes itself for an overlord or creator of facts, are like the shattered halves of the truth that was not fulfilled in the world and the failure of which also affects thought. The truth cannot be patched together from its pieces.

The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.

Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.

If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought's powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence.

What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content.

Thought as such… is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it; this is what thought has inherited from its archetype, the relation between labor and material. Today, when ideologues tend more than ever to encourage thought to be positive, they cleverly note that positivity runs precisely counter to thought, and that it takes friendly persuasion by social authority to accustom thought to positivity.

The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.

Relativism is vulgar materialism, thought disturbs the business.

Could you not portray the good sides of life and proclaim love as a principle, instead of endless bitterness?" There is only one expression for truth: the thought which repudiates injustice. If insistence on the good sides of life is not sublated in the negative whole, it transfigures its own opposite: violence.

The task of thought is to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.