Quotes About Thought

expression—nothing

On hearing these dreadful words my daughter Penelope said she didn't know what prevented her heart from flying straight out of her. I thought privately it might have been her stays.

Don't let me think—that is all I ask now, Marian—don't let me think.

I find novels compose my mind. Do you read novels too? - Reverend Finch's wife

Art is the creation of beauty; it is the expression of thought or feeling in a form that seems beautiful or sublime, and therefore arouses in us some reverberation of that primordial delight which woman gives to man, or man to woman.

Spinoza is not to be read, he is to be studied; you must approach him as you would approach Euclid, recognizing that in these brief two hundred pages a man has written down his lifetime's thought with stoic sculptury of everything superfluous.

coarse necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain.

In short, Aristotle destroys the soul in order to give it immortality; the immortal soul is pure thought, undefiled with reality, just as Aristotle's God is pure activity, undefiled with action. Let him who can, be comforted with this theology. One wonders sometimes whether this metaphysical eating of one's cake and keeping it is not Aristotle's subtle Way of saving himself from anti-Macedonian hemlock?

A true empiricism is one that sets itself the task of getting as close as possible to the original, of sounding the depths of life, of feeling the pulse of its spirit by a sort of intellectual auscultation; we listen in on the current of life. By direct perception we feel the presence of the mind; by intellectual circumlocution we arrive at the notion that thought is a dance of molecules in the brain. Is there any doubt that intuition here beholds more truly the heart of life?

In place of the Absolute as determining history through the Zeitgeist, Marx offered mass movements and economic forces as the basic causes of every fundamental change, whether in the world of things or in the life of thought. Hegel, the imperial professor, had hatched the socialistic eggs.

Intellectualism—the conception of man as above all a thinking animal, consciously adapting means to rationally chosen ends—fell sick with Rousseau, took to its bed with Kant, and died with Schopenhauer.

A little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.

THERE IS A PLEASURE in philosophy, and a lure even in the mirages of metaphysics, which every student feels until the coarse necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain.

For the mind of man (and here at last is the great thesis of Kant) is not passive wax upon which experience and sensation write their absolute and yet whimsical will; nor is it a mere abstract name for the series or group of mental states; it is an active organ which moulds and coördinates sensations into ideas, an organ which transforms the chaotic multiplicity of experience into the ordered unity of thought.

Wherever philosophy arises, the moral health of the nation decays.

So philosophy purifies the will. But philosophy is to be understood as experience and thought, not as mere reading or passive study.

Passion without reason is blind, reason without passion is dead. Thought should not lack the heat of desire, nor desire the light of thought.

Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt—particularly to doubt one's cherished beliefs, one's dogmas and one's axioms. Who knows how these cherished beliefs became certainties with us, and whether some secret wish did not furtively beget them, clothing desire in the dress of thought? There is no real philosophy until the mind turns round and examines itself. Gnothi seauton, said Socrates: Know thyself.

I dealt with so recklessly some years ago in my books Philosophy and the Social Problem (1917), The Story of Philosophy (1926), Transition (1927), The Mansions (or Pleasures) of Philosophy (1929), and On the Meaning of Life (1932). I know that life is in its basis a mystery; a river flowing from an unseen source and in its development an infinite subtlety; a "dome of many-colored glass," too complex for thought, much less for utterance.

Thought is a melody, Audrey thinks, while the body is an inert mechanism of cogs, springs, chains and ratchets...

human intelligence is by definition what humans naturally do...

For I dance And drink and sing, Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing. If thought is life And strength and breath And the want Of thought is death Then am I A happy fly If I live Or if I die

Little Fly Thy summers play, My thoughtless hand Has brush'd away. Am not I A fly like thee? Or art not thou A man like me? For I dance And drink & sing: Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing. If thought is life And strength & breath: And the want Of thought is death; Then am I A happy fly, If I live, Or if I die

When thought is closed in caves, then love shall show its root in deepest hell.