Sunday, May 10, 2009 – Just Thinking
Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both. ~ John Andrew Holmes
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it. ~ Stephen Leacock
Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, and lessens the frictions of social contacts. ~ Clare Booth Luce
Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day. ~ Bertrand Russell
Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things. ~ Russell Baker
Original thoughts can be understood only in virtue of the unoriginal elements which they contain. ~ Vittorio Alfieri, Don Garzia (III, 1)
The kings of modern thought are dumb. ~ Matthew Arnold, Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse
Never express yourself more clearly than you think. ~ Niels Bohr, Einstein Lived Here
What exile from himself can flee? To zones, though more and more remote, Still, still pursues, where’er I be, The blight of life – the demon Thought. ~ Byron, Childe Harold (canto I, st. 84, l. 6)
Thought once awakened does not again slumber. ~ Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship
The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have. ~ John Locke
When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon. ~ Thomas Paine
An Englishman thinks seated; a Frenchman, standing; an American, pacing; an Irishman, afterward. ~ Austin O’Malley
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home. ~ Sigmund Freud
A library is thought in cold storage. ~ Herbert Samuel
Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all. ~Abraham Lincoln
All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
The forceps of our minds are clumsy things and crush the truth a little in the course of taking hold of it. ~ H.G. Wells
I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again? ~ Winnie the Pooh
Some people get lost in thought because it’s such unfamiliar territory. ~ G. Behn
My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking. ~ Amy Winehouse
Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once a week. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man. But they don’t bite everybody. ~ Stanislaw Lec, Unkempt Thoughts, 1962
Sometimes I think and other times I am. ~Paul Valéry, Variété: Cantiques spirituels, 1924
People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is actually done by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it. ~ Anthony de Mello
Sometimes people mistake the way I talk for what I am thinking. ~ Idi Amin
Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed. ~ Walter Lippmann
Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
What was once thought can never be unthought. ~ Friedrich Dilrrenmatt
Some people do not become thinkers simply because their memories are too good. ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Ours is the age which is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to. ~ Howard Mumford Jones
Man is a slow, sloppy and brilliant thinker; the machine is fast, accurate and stupid. ~ William M. Kelly
Three minutes’ thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time. ~ – A. E. Housman
Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking. ~ Goethe
You are the product of other people’s habitual way of thinking. ~ James A. Ray
Just Above Sunset 