Quotes About Thought

To think is to forget.

To think is to ignore the differences, to generalize, to abstract.

I no longer believe in literary schools now; I believe in the individual.

Por lo demás, la literatura no es otra cosa que un sueño dirigido.

Gradualmente, el enigma concreto que me atareaba me inquietó menos que el enigma genérico de una sentencia escrita por un dios. ¿Qué tipo de sentencia (me pregunté) construirá una mente absoluta? Consideré que aun en los lenguajes humanos no hay proposición que no implique el universo entero…

It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much.

I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.

Berkeley affirmed the existence of personal identity, "I my self am not my ideas, but somewhat else, a thinking active principle that perceives . . ." (Dialogues, 3); Hume, the skeptic, refutes this identity and makes of every man "a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity" (op. cit., I, 4, 6).

No hay consuelo mas hábil que el pensamiento de que hemos elegido nuestras desdichas.

I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details. The equivocal clarity of dawn penetrated along the earthen patio.

Había aprendido sin esfuerzo el inglés, el francés, el portugués, el latín. Sospecho, sin embargo, que no era muy capaz de pensar. Pensar es olvidar diferencias, es generalizar, abstraer. En el abarrotado mundo de Funes no había sino detalles, casi inmediatos

Let no one reduce us to the status of ascetics. There is no pleasure more complex than that of thought and we surrendered ourselves to it.

Century upon century of idealism could hardly have failed to influence reality.

El pensamiento más fugaz obedece a un dibujo invisible y puede coronar, o inaugurar, una forma secreta. Sé de quienes obraban el mal para que en los siglos futuros resultara el bien, o hubiera resultado en los ya pretéritos... Encarados así, todos nuestros actos son justos, pero también son indiferentes. No hay méritos morales o intelectuales.

El hecho de que toda filosofía sea de antemano un juego dialéctico, una Philosophie des Als Ob, ha contribuido a multiplicarlas.

The effort of human thought has not been able to track down the essence of a single gnat.

More than anything, memory resembles a library in alphabetical disorder, and with no collected works by anyone.

As Kant said, the thing in itself is no thing. It transcends thingness, it goes past anything that could be thought. The best things can't be told because they transcend thought. The second best are misunderstood, because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can't be thought about. The third best are what we talk about. And myth is that field of reference to what is absolutely transcendent.

Tienes que distinguir entre razón y pensamiento. Pensar como puedes echar abajo la pared no es razonar (...) La razón tiene que ver con hallar el fundamento del ser y la estructuración fundamental del orden del universo.

Three minutes thought would suffice to find this out but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

Surely the obscure soul of the dog must be far more susceptible to the vibrations of thought than the human. … Do they not bark because they feel the presence of a dead man?

It was one of the marks of sentience, the ability to distinguish reality from fantasy and still indulge in fantasy. In other words: I lied, therefore I thought.

One of the difficulties of thinking clearly about anything is that it is almost impossible not to form our ideas in words which have some previous association for us; with the result that our thought is already shaped along certain lines before we have begun to follow it out. Again, a word may have various meanings, and our use of it in one sense may deceive our readers (or even ourselves) into supposing that we were using it in some other sense.

an intellectual betrayed his mission if he was not the most constant defender of civilization and freedom of thought