Human Thought Quotes - Page 3

• What a frightful weapon is human thought! It is our defense and our safeguard, the most precious gift that God has made us. It is ours and it obeys us; we may launch it forth into space, but, once outside of our feeble brains, it is gone; we can no longer control it.

  Alfred de Musset

  Space, Brain, Gone

  Alfred de Musset (1923). “Confession of a child of the century”

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• There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Spring, Writing, Ideas

  "The Idiot". Book by Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1868 - 1869.

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• Today, when you combine the web with the iPad, you have the most advanced medium for human thought and communication ever created.

  Mike McCue

  Communication, Ipads, Today

  "What Drives You? 10 Top Tech Mavericks tell us what drives them and why". ORIGIN Magazine Interview, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Life, Change, Song

  Viktor E. Frankl (2015). “Man's Search For Meaning, Gift Edition”, p.35, Beacon Press

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• [One task of intellectuals is] to break down the stereotypes and reductive categories that are . . . limiting to human thought and communication.

  Edward Said

  Communication, Tasks, Stereotype

  Source: www.publicanthropology.org

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• Magic is a kind of energy. It is given shape by human thoughts and emotions, by imagination. Thoughts define that shape—and words help to define those thoughts. That’s why wizards usually use words to help them with their spells. Words provide a sort of insulation as the energy of magic burns through a spell caster’s mind.

  Jim Butcher

  Imagination, Magic, Mind

  Jim Butcher (2001). “Fool Moon: Book two of The Dresden Files”, p.94, Penguin

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• A beautiful book is a victory won in all the battlefields of human thought.

  Honore de Balzac

  Beautiful, Book, Victory

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• If I were a physics teacher or a science teacher, it'd be on my mind all the time as how the hell we really got this way. It's a perfectly natural human thought and, okay, if you go into the science class you can't think this. Well, alright, as soon as you leave you can start thinking about it again without giving aid and comfort to the lunatic fringe of the Christian religion.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Christian, Teacher, Thinking

  "Kurt Vonnegut Judges Modern Society". "Morning Edition" with Steve Inskeep, www.npr.org. January 23, 2006.

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• Sciences usually advances by a succession of small steps, through a fog in which even the most keen-sighted explorer can seldom see more than a few paces ahead. Occasionally the fog lifts, an eminence is gained, and a wider stretch of territory can be surveyed-sometimes with startling results. A whole science may then seem to undergo a kaleidoscopic rearrangement, fragments of knowledge sometimes being found to fit together in a hitherto unsuspected manner. Sometimes the shock of readjustment may spread to other sciences; sometimes it may divert the whole current of human thought.

  James Jeans

  Knowledge, Science, Fog

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• The real cause of the great upheavals which precede changes of civilisations, such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Arabian Empire, is a profound modification in the ideas of the peoples .... The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought .... The present epoch is one of these critical moments in which the thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation.

  Gustave Le Bon

  Real, Fall, Memorable

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• The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Science, Understanding, Progress

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.173, Harvard University Press

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• Humans can think inhuman thoughts.

  Terry Pratchett

  Thinking, Humans, Inhuman

  Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen, Terry Pratchett (2013). “The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day”, p.25, Random House

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• What deadens us most to God's presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continually engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought.

  Frederick Buechner

  Thinking, Endless, Dialogue

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• No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Passion, Men, Profound

  "Biographia Literaria". Book by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ch. XV, 1817.

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• A religious belief is not a statement about Reality, but a hint, a clue about something that is a mystery, beyond the grasp of human thought. In short, a religious belief is only a finger pointing to the moon. Some religious people never get beyond the study of the finger. Others are engaged in sucking it. Others yet use the finger to gouge their eyes out. These are the bigots whom religion has made blind. Rare indeed is the religionist who is sufficiently detached from the finger to see what it is indicating - these are those who, having gone beyond belief, are taken for blasphemers.

  Anthony de Mello

  Religious, Taken, Eye

  "One Minute Nonsense". Book by Anthony de Mello (p. 134), 1992.

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• Human thought can literally transform the physical world .. we are the masters of our own universe

  Dan Brown

  World, Masters, Humans

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• If it is true that the violin is the most perfect of musical instruments, then Greek is the violin of human thought.

  Helen Keller

  Perfect, Greek, Musical

  Helen Keller (2015). “The Story of My Life: Top Biography”, p.174, 谷月社

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• Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first.I say that information doesn't deserve to be free.Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?...Information is alienated experience.

  Jaron Lanier

  Real, Ambition, Thinking

  Jaron Lanier (2010). “You Are Not a Gadget”, p.28, Vintage

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• One must not consider a language as a product dead, and formed but once; it is an animate being, and ever creative. Human thought elaborates itself with the progress of intelligence; and of this thought language is a manifestation. An idiom cannot therefore remain stationary; it walks, it develops, it grows up, it fortifies itself, it becomes old, and it reaches decrepitude.

  Wilhelm von Humboldt

  Growing Up, Creative, Progress

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• Every wheatfield of human thought after a while becomes filled with cockle; then the husbandmen destroy the grain with the cockle and plant anew.

  Austin O'Malley

  Plant, Grain, Filled

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• The emergence of a new term to describe a certain phenomenon, of a new adjective to designate a certain quality, is always of interest, both linguistically and from the point of view of the history of human thought.

  Logan Pearsall Smith

  Views, Quality, Adjectives

  Logan Pearsall Smith (1989). “An anthology”

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• Sartre is one example of someone who does just this. Every text is, after all, a human document and whatever Kierkegaard thought about God was clearly a matter of human thought that can, in principle, be retrieved and interpreted by other human beings. A phenomenological approach to religion must, it seems to me, adopt the old adage: nothing human is alien to me.

  George Pattison

  Principles, Example, Doe

  "Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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• By wit we search divine aspect above,
  By wit we learn what secrets science yields,
  By wit we speak, by wit the mind is rul'd,
  By wit we govern all our actions;
  Wit is the loadstar of each human thought,
  Wit is the tool by which all things are wrought.

  Robert Greene

  Yield, Secret, Mind

  Robert Greene, George Peele, Alexander Dyce (1861). “The dramatic and poetical works: With memoirs of the authors and notes”, p.319

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• Philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor.

  Martin Heidegger

  Philosophy, Able, World

  "Der Spiegel" Magazine, May 31, 1976.

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• The subject for which I am asking your attention deals with the foundations of mathematics. To understand the development of the opposing theories existing in this field one must first gain a clear understnding of the concept "science"; for it is as a part of science that mathematics originally took its place in human thought.

  L. E. J. Brouwer

  Foundation, Attention, Asking

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