Quotes About Thought

I would rather be exposed to all their torments than be obliged to think about them in order to protect myself from their attacks.

Two fundamental factors are at the base of this transformation. The first is the destruction of those religious, political, and social beliefs in which all the elements of our civilisation are rooted. The second is the creation of entirely new conditions of existence and thought as the result of modern scientific and industrial discoveries.

I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I . . . because . . . ugh!

Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all.

The consciousness that says 'I am' is not the consciousness that thinks.

Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.

One can ask why the I has to appear in the cogito {Descartes' argument "I think therefore I am.}, since the cogito, if used rightly, is the awareness of pure consciousness, not directed at any fact or action. In fact the I is not necessary here, since it is never united directly to consciousness. One can even imagine a pure and self-aware consciousness which thinks of itself as impersonal spontaneity.

I am a mere breath of air; a formless thought that thinks of you.

I am, I am, I exist, I think therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think anymore.

This then is the age of reason.

Je ne suis rien que le regard qui te voit, que cette pensée incolore qui te pense.

Que me den algo que hacer, lo que sea! Sería preferible que pensara en otra cosa, porque en este momento estoy por representarme la comedia. Sé muy bien que no quiero hacer nada; hacer algo es crear existencia, y ya hay bastante existencia.

I exist because I think … and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment–it's frightful–if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing.

One thus arrives at a curious conception of thought. Thought has no real, concrete existence, accessible to immediate consciousness, since the datum of introspection is the image. It has no universality in act, because, if it were so, one should be able to grasp it directly. But it is a potential universality that one derives from the fact that a word can be accompanied by very different images.

For a consciousness to be capable of imagining…it needs to be free.

Zaten sözcüklerden gayr? ne var ki...

A search for justification and the impossibility of justification are recurrent motifs in the philosophy of Sartre. His philosophy is one of the incarnations of problematism and of the ambiguity of contemporary thought (for Man does seem, to the contemporary mind, to be ambiguous).

Thirdly, the existent individual is impassioned, impassioned with a passionate thought; he is inspired; he is a kind of incarnation of the infinite in the finite. This passion which animates the existent (and this brings us to the fourth characteristic) is what Kierkegaard calls "the passion of freedom.

El mundo de las explicaciones y razones no es el de la existencia.

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think . . . and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment—it's frightful—if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing.

Writing is a consciousness formally at work in the territory of the imaginary.

Your mind is just like a parachute ! if you don't open it, it won't work !

To meditate is to labour; to think is to act. Folded arms work, closed hands perform, a gaze fixed on heaven is a toil.

Men of thought seldom work well together, whereas between men of action there is usually an easy camaraderie.