Quotes About Thought

Beyond thought I reach a state. I refuse to divide it up into words -and what I cannot and do not want to express ends up being the most secret of my secrets. I know that I'm scared of the moments in which I don't use thought and that's a momentary state that is difficult to reach, and which, entirely secret, no longer uses the words with which thoughts are produced. Is not using words to lose your identity? is it getting lost in the harmful essential shadows?

Clarice Lispector

One night, I'd only just lain down," she told him, "when one of the legs of the bed collapsed throwing me to the ground. After an irate movement, because I wasn't at least sleepy enough to go without comfort, I suddenly thought: why a whole bed and not a broken one? I lay down and was soon asleep...

It so happens that the primary though - as an act of thought - already has a form and is more easily transmitte to itself, or rather, to the very person who is thinking it; and that is why - because it has a form - it has a limited reach. Whereas the thought called "freedom" is free as an act of thought. It's so free that even to its thinker it seems to have no author.

If my life is transformed into it-self, the thing I today call sensitivity will not exist — it will be called indifference. But I cannot yet grasp that way. It is as if hundreds of thousands of years from now we are finally no longer what we feel and think: we shall have something that more closely resembles a "mood" than an idea. We shall be the living matter revealing itself directly, ignorant of word, surpassing thought which is always grotesque.

Como, pois, inaugurar agora em mim o pensamento? E talvez só o pensamento me salvasse, tenho medo da paixão.

Depois que descobri em mim mesma como é que se pensa, fazendo comigo mesma negociatas, nunca mais pude acreditar no pensamento dos outros.

Hay muchas cosas por decir que no sé cómo decir. Me faltan las palabras. Pero me niego a inventar otras nuevas. Las que ya existen deben deccir o que se consigue decir y lo que está prohibido. Y lo que está prohibido lo adivino. Si hubiese fuerza. Más allá del pensamiento no hay palabras: se es. Mi pintura no tiene palabras: está más allá del pensamiento. En ese terreno del se es soy puro éxtasis cristalino. Se es. Me soy. Tú te eres.

And it irritated me beyond all measure that a thought so enormous and ludicrous should return when my logic had dismissed it.

In the mid-1990s, while serving as senior editor for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, I proposed a thought experiment to test whether Buddhism could spread around the globe. That test consisted of a single question: Did Buddhism have a teaching that was so universal it could pass quickly from person to person without getting stopped in its tracks, leaping across national, ethnic, economic, and even religious boundaries?

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Thought is the original source of all wealth, all success, all material gain, all great discoveries and inventions, and of all achievement.

The person with a fixed goal, a clear picture of his desire, or an ideal always before him, causes it, through repetition, to be buried deeply in his subconscious mind and is thus enabled, thanks to its generative and sustaining power, to realize his goal in a minimum of time and with a minimum of physical effort. Just pursue the thought unceasingly. Step by step you will achieve realization, for all your faculties and powers become directed to that end.

It's amazing how just one thing said by just one person in the middle of just one conversation on just one regular day can start a person wondering things she had never wondered before.

uno debería escribir en la lengua con la que piensa, con la que sueña.

Sometimes you read something and a thought that was floating around in your veins organizes itself into the sentence that reflects it.

The man doesn't acknowledge you as you sit down because the man knows more about the unoccupied seat than you do. For him, you imagine, it is more like breath than wonder; he has had to think about it so much you wouldn't call it thought.

We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn't a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in this regard.

Thinking is the same as breathing. You stop thinking, you stop breathing.

Thinking like human is the easy part. Acting and living like human is the hard part.

The essence of writing is enkindled by the heart and soul of the thinker.

We prefer to think that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source.

Extremism is so easy. You've got your position, and that's it. It doesn't take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right you meet the same idiots coming around from the left. (Interview, Time Magazine , February 20, 2005)

Men ought to treat with caution those that clarify the deed by seeing deep into the thought that lies behind it.