Quotes About Thought

Too many are, as Tertullian saith in another case,[29] more tender of their reputation than their salvation: who are more ashamed to be thought ignorant, than careful to have it cured.

The expression "to write something down" suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.

Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.

Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.

I Think, Therefore, You Are

Society is itself an education in the extrovert values, and rarely has there been a society that has preached them so hard. No man is an island, but how John Donne would writhe to hear how often, and for what reasons, the thought is so tiresomely repeated.

Hay tres tipos de acciones: físicas, verbales y mentales. Por lo general concedemos mayor importancia a las acciones físicas, luego a las verbales y por último a las mentales.

Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought.

To think ill of mankind, and not to wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.

As if (I remember thinking) some monstrous giant had been holding mad carnival with itself at the end of that great passage.

Luckily, literature—and by "literature" I mean comic books—provides us a way to discuss issues like these without having to experience them. We don't have to trick people into standing in front of a runaway trolley, and we don't have to have a real-life Batman and Joker. That's what thought experiments are for—they let us play through an imaginary scenario and imagine what we should or shouldn't do.

The word violence comes from roots that mean "the undue use of force." Thought that imposes or defends is violent.

An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.

Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.

The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that… it is always interested more in one part of its object [thought] than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.

Consciousness… does not appear to itself chopped up in bits…. A "river" or a "stream" are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

But if each day we gather some new truths, plant ourselves more firmly upon principles which are eternal, guard every thought and action, that it may be pure, and conform our lives more nearly to that Perfect Model, we shall form a character that will be a fit background on which to paint the noblest deeds and the grandest intellectual and moral achievements; a character that cannot be concealed, but which will bring success in this life and form the best preparation for that which is beyond.

Remember that [scientific thought] is the guide of action; that the truth which it arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.

The aim of scientific thought, then, is to apply past experience to new circumstances; the instrument is an observed uniformity in the course of events. By the use of this instrument it gives us information transcending our experience, it enables us to infer things that we have not seen from things that we have seen; and the evidence for the truth of that information depends on our supposing that the uniformity holds good beyond our experience.

scientific thought does not mean thought about scientific subjects with long names. There are no scientific subjects. The subject of science is the human universe; that is to say, everything that is, or has been, or may be related to man.

Leo Strauss's discoveries in the history of political philosophy had the effect of liberating his students from the yoke of contemporary thought.

An emotion is a thought, yes, an idea, but it is also a sensation, an ache in your body. Desire, love, hate, fear, repulsion - you feel these things in your muscle and bones, not just in your mind.

J. Gresham Machen solemnly warned, False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the Gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation to be controlled by ideas which prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.1