Quotes About Thought

As Joan Didion said, "I don't know what I think until I write about it.

Einstein called this tactic "combinatory play"—the act of opening up one mental channel by dabbling in another.

The thought of flight has melted me, I am less solid than liquid, then I'm going up and going invisible like steam.

I do not want to work. I want to think about what it is they want to do to my brain and think about what it means. It means more than they say; everything they say means more than it says. Beyond the words is the tone; beyond the tone is the context; beyond the context is the unexplored territory of normal socialization, vast and dark as night, lit by the few pinpricks of similar experience, like stars.

I had had my night of weeping...I had purged myself of useless emotions that terrible night, now every nerve every sinew, every thought was bent on a single purpose

But in the earlier hours, or so I have read, they still have got their daylight minds. It takes the midnight mind to do the black deed to the black man.

The disorder of the desk, the floor; the yellow Post-it notes everywhere; the whiteboards covered with scrawl: all this is the outward manifestation of the messiness of human thought. The messiness cannot go into the program; it piles up around the programmer.

Even the very system of bishoprics galled the devout adherents of the old, saintly Celtic church, that had no worldly trappings, courted no thrones, but rather withdrew from the world into the blessed solitude of thought and prayer.

And are you thinking, Hugh, what I am thinking?

no thought, if it be non-mathematical in spirit, can be trusted, and, although mathematicians sometimes make mistakes, the spirit of mathematics is always right and always sound.

The whole complexion of things was suddenly changed. There could be no thought of a landing, not here at least

And this gray spirit yearning in desireTo follow knowledge like a sinking star,Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

We cannot think first and act afterward. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.

The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and, if need be, die for it.

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.

Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end when philosophic thought has done its best the wonder remains.

We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only guide it by taking thought.

Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.

Russell is a Platonic dialogue in himself.

From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.

Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past. In its day, the literature of the past was an adventure. Aischylus, Sophocles, Euripides were adventurers in the world of thought. To read their plays without any sense of new ways of understanding the world and of savouring its emotions is to miss the vividness which constitutes their whole value. But adventures are to the adventurous. Thus a passive knowledge of the past loses the whole value of its message.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato