Thoughtful Quotes - Page 30

• Knowing does not always allow us to prevent, but at least the things that we know, we hold them, if not in our hands, but at leastin our thoughts where we may dispose of them at our whim, which gives us the illusion of power over them.

  Marcel Proust

  Power, Thinking, Hands

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• Sinclair Lewis is the perfect example of the false sense of time of the newspaper world.... [ellipsis in source] He was always dominated by an artificial time when he wrote Main Street.... He did not create actual human beings at any time. That is what makes it newspaper. Sinclair Lewis is the typical newspaperman and everything he says is newspaper. The difference between a thinker and a newspaperman is that a thinker enters right into things, a newspaperman is superficial.

  Gertrude Stein

  Thinking, Differences, Perfect

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• Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Thinking, Order, Creating

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• Compose. (No ideas
  but in things) Invent!
  Saxifrage is my flower that splits
  the rocks.

  William Carlos Williams

  Flower, Thinking, Rocks

  William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christopher MacGowan (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.455, New Directions Publishing

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• After I went to bed I had a curious fancy as to dreams. In sleep the doors of the mind are shut, and thoughts come jumping in at the windows. They tumble headlong, and therefore are so disorderly and strange. Sometimes they are stout and light on their feet, and then they are rational dreams.

  James Boswell

  Dream, Sleep, Thinking

  James Boswell (2001). “Boswell's Edinburgh Journals 1767-1786”, Mercat Press Books

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• And from the first declension of the flesh
  I learnt man's tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts
  Into the stony idiom of the brain.

  Dylan Thomas

  Men, Thinking, Brain

  Dylan Thomas, Daniel Jones (2003). “The Poems of Dylan Thomas”, p.92, New Directions Publishing

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• In the beginning was the secret brain.
  The brain was celled and soldered in the thought

  Dylan Thomas

  Thinking, Secret, Brain

  Dylan Thomas (2010). “The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: The Original Edition”, p.34, New Directions Publishing

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• The finest works of art are those in which there is the least matter. The closer expression comes to thought, the more the word clings to the idea and disappears, the more beautiful the work of art.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Beautiful, Art, Thinking

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• I discuss with myself questions of politics, love, taste, or philosophy. I let my mind rove wantonly, give it free rein to followany idea, wise or mad that may present itself. My ideas are my harlots.

  Denis Diderot

  Funny, Wise, Honesty

  "Rameau's Nephew". Book by Denis Diderot, 1805.

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• In order to begin an analysis, there must already be a synthesis present in the mind.

  Johan Huizinga

  Thinking, Order, Mind

  Johan Huizinga (2014). “Men and Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance”, p.25, Princeton University Press

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• Most thoughtful Americans of today seem to have forgotten how strongly their own and immediate predecessors, Emerson, Hawthorne and Whitman, were still preoccupied with the essence behind things.

  Johan Huizinga

  America, Essence, Today

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• ... the will always wills to do something and thus implicitly holds in contempt sheer thinking, whose whole activity depends on "doing nothing.

  Hannah Arendt

  Thinking, Doing Nothing, Action

  Hannah Arendt (1978). “Willing”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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• Our Last Will and Testament, providing for the only future of which we can be reasonably certain, namely our own death, shows thatthe Will's need to will is no less strong than Reason's need to think; in both instances the mind transcends its own natural limitations, either by asking unanswerable questions or by projecting itself into a future which, for the willing subject, will never be.

  Hannah Arendt

  Death, Strong, Thinking

  Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.270, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought. A thought is a proposition with a sense.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Thinking, Language, Propositions

  Ludwig Wittgenstein, David Francis Pears, Brian McGuinness (2001). “Tractatus Logico-philosophicus”, p.22, Psychology Press

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• I haven't had one sexual thought since the court martial.

  Stanley Kubrick

  Sex, Thinking, Trials

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• Have you ever had a single moment's thought about my responsibilities?

  Stanley Kubrick

  Single Mom, Responsibility, Thinking

  Stanley Kubrick, Gene D. Phillips (2001). “Stanley Kubrick: Interviews”, p.106, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• I am hungry to be interrupted
  For ever and ever amen
  O Person from Porlock come quickly
  And bring my thoughts to an end.

  Stevie Smith

  Thinking, Hungry, Ends

  Stevie Smith, James MacGibbon (1983). “Collected Poems”, p.386, New Directions Publishing

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• The rain of matter upon sense
  Destroys me momently. The score:
  There comes what will come.

  Yvor Winters

  Rain, Thinking, Matter

  Yvor Winters (1960). “Collected poems”

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• ... so long as woman sat with bandaged eyes and manacled hands, fast bound in the clamps of ignorance and inaction, the world of thought moved in its orbit like the revolutions of the moon; with one face (the man's face) always out, so that the spectator could not distinguish whether it was disc or sphere.

  Anna Julia Cooper

  Ignorance, Eye, Moon

  Anna Julia Cooper, Charles C. Lemert, Esme Bhan (1998). “The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters”, p.76, Rowman & Littlefield

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• The quality of a man's mind can generally be judged by the size of his wastepaper basket.

  Jose Bergamin

  Life, Men, Thinking

  "Head in the Clouds". Book by Jose Bergamin, 1934.

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• Overt intelligent performances are not clues to the workings of minds; they are those workings. Boswell described Johnson's mind when he described how he wrote, talked, ate, fidgeted and fumed. His description was, of course, incomplete, since there were notoriously some thoughts which Johnson kept carefully to himself and there must have been many dreams, daydreams and silent babblings which only Johnson could have recorded and only a James Joyce would wish him to have recorded.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Dream, Thinking, Intelligent

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• Stevenson had noble ideas--as did the young Franklin for that matter. But Stevenson felt that the way to implement them was to present himself as a thoughtful idealist and wait for the world to flock to him. He considered it below him, or wrong, to scramble out among the people and ask them what they wanted. Roosevelt grappled voters to him. Stevenson shied off from them. Some thought him too pure to desire power, though he showed ambition when it mattered.

  Garry Wills

  Ambition, Ideas, People

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• [T]he categories of intentionality are nothing more nor less than the metalinguistic categories in terms of which we talk epistemically about overt speech as they appear in the framework of thoughts construed on the model of over speech.

  Wilfrid Sellars

  Thinking, Speech, Framework

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• The interpretation of thought as ""inner speech" has taken different forms, and has been used to clarify a variety of problems--thus problems pertaining to the logical forms of thought and the connection of thought with things.

  Wilfrid Sellars

  Taken, Thinking, Speech

  Wilfrid Sellars (1968). “Science and metaphysics: variations on Kantian themes”

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• When the whole world is writing letters, it's easy to lap into the quiet within, tell the story of an hour, keep alive the narrating inner life. To be alone in the presence of one's thought is not a value, only a common practice.

  Vivian Gornick

  Writing, Thinking, Practice

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