Quotes about Thought

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

Action without thought is mindlessness, and thought without action is hypocritical.

Opinion involves belief (for without belief in what we opine we cannot have an opinion), and in the brutes though we often find imagination we never find belief.

Imagination builds the image of the self, and thought then functions within its shadows. From this self-concept grows the conflict between what is and what should be, the conflict in duality.

I don't understand the process of imagination-though I know that I am very much at its mercy.

If there is anything in the world that can really be called a man's property, it is surely that which is the result of his mental activity.

The head thinks, the hands labor, but it's the heart that laughs.

Universes fashioned by words and concepts that work together to provide a more or less coherent frame of reference for all thought and action.

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

It seems so to me, said his wife, as if she were producing a new thought.

The invisible world of thought and conduct had been the frequent subject of his musings; but the other, tangible world was close to him too, spreading like a rich populous plain between himself and the distant heights of speculation. The old doubts, the old dissatisfactions, hung on the edge of consciousness; but he was too profoundly Italian not to linger awhile in that atmosphere of careless acquiescence that is so pleasant a medium for the unhampered enjoyment of life. Some day

What is originality in art? Perhaps it is easier to define what it is not and this may be done by saying that it is never a willful rejection of what has been accepted as the necessary laws of various forms of art. Thus in reasoning originality relies not in discarding the necessary laws of thought, but in using them to express new intellectual conceptions. In poetry originality consists not in discarding the necessary laws of rhythm but in finding new rhythms within the limits of those laws.