Quotes to inspire and reflect

It belongs to the self-respect ot intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravel- ment.

The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors.

Thought depends absolutely on the stomach, but in spite of that, those who have the best stomachs are not the best thinkers.

I know what I’m thinking bout, I think. Nothing. And as much of it as I can.

Those who think are excessively few; and those few do not set themselves to disturb the world.

We pass thoughts around, from mind to mind, so compulsively and with such speed that the brains of mankind often appear, functionally, to be undergoing fusion.

The body always ends by being a bore. Nothing remains beautiful and interesting except thought, because the thought is the life.

Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress.

Man is obviously made to think. It is his whole dignity and his whole merit.

All the mind’s activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.

By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought 1 comprehend the world.

Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.

Most thinkers write badly, because they communicate not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of them.

Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.

The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have.

All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.

You may derive thoughts from others; your way ol thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own.

To meditate is to labour; to think is to act.

Those that think must govern those that toil.

The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame.

What is the hardest task in the world? To think.

All thought is a feat of association: having what’s in front of you bring up something in your mind that you almost didn’t know you knew.

Thought makes every thing fit for use.

If a man sits down to think, he is immediately asked if he has the headache.

What was once thought can never be unthought.

We get into the habit of living before, acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

In itself, a thought, / A slumbering thought, is capable of years, / And curdles a long life into one hour.

One thought fills immensity.

Let us work without theorizing ... tis the only way to make life, endurable.

The utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.

To be sure, theory is useful. But without warmth of heart and without love it bruises the very ones it claims to save.

It is only theory that makes men completely incautious.

In theory, there is nothing to hinder our following what we are taught, but in life there are many things to draw us aside.

No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go beyond.

Theological religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances; it is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.

The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearances of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life.

Hypotheses are only the pieces of scaffolding which are erected round a building during the course of construction, and which are taken away as soon as the edifice is completed.

Theology is an attempt to explain a subject by men who do not understand it. The intent is not to tell the truth but to satisfy the questioner.

The cure for false theology is motherwit. Forget your books and traditions, and obey your moral perceptions at this hour.

The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being.

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself.

First, I hate all theological controversy: it is wearing to the temper, and is I believe (at all events when viva voce) worse than useless.

We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.

On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past and the future, w'hich is the essential character of conscious being.

A dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and countershocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment.

A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.