Thoughtful Quotes - Page 9

• When the president talks about tax reform, he talks about the people who will benefit. He talks about American jobs. He talks about the fact that we're going to be taking money that's overseas and bringing it back to the United States so that it will employ American workers. I think that focus again on the American working and middle class is- is-is to me the most thoughtful and, in some ways, the most genius part of Trump's approach to politics.

  James Vance

  Thinking, People, Focus

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• Conversationis like the table of contents of a dull book.... All the greatest subjects of human thought are proudly displayedin it. Listen to it for three minutes, and you ask yourself which is more striking, the emphasis of the speaker or his shocking ignorance.

  Stendhal

  Book, Ignorance, Thinking

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• Any individual decisions can be badly thought through, and yet be successful, or exceedingly well thought through, but be unsuccessful, because the recognized possibility of failure in fact occurs. But over time, more thoughtful decision-making will lead to better overall results, and more thoughtful decision-making can be encouraged by evaluating decisions on how well they were made rather than on outcome.

  Robert Rubin

  Successful, Decision, Outcomes

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• I have watchedmany literary fashions shoot up and blossom, and then fade and drop.... Yet with the many that I have seen comeand go, I have never yet encountered a mode of thinking that regarded itself as simply a changing fashion, and not as an infallible approach to the right culture.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Fashion, Thinking, Literature

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• ...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the "tough guy;" today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Hero, Thinking, Blessing

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• Thought enables us to see Fate coming.

  Mason Cooley

  Fate, Thinking

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• By the time I have clarified a thought, I no longer want to think it.

  Mason Cooley

  Thinking, Want

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• Every few years something new breaks into the circle of my thoughts.

  Mason Cooley

  Thinking, Years, Circles

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• A small boy puts his hand on the wall, and looks down intently as he wriggles his toes. The birth of thought?

  Mason Cooley

  Wall, Boys, Thinking

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• The thinker as reader reads what has been written.
  He wears the words he reads to look upon
  Within his being.

  Wallace Stevens

  Reading, Thinking, Looks

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.492, Vintage

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• God secludes Himself; but the thinker listens at the door.

  Victor Hugo

  God, Thinking, Doors

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• Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

  Honore de Balzac

  Art, Science, Thinking

  Honore De Balzac (2011). “Louis Lambert”, p.36, The Floating Press

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• Mr. Doctor, that loose gown becomes you so well I wonder your notions should be so narrow.

  Elizabeth I

  Thinking, Doctors, Gowns

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• Intuition, like the rays of the sun, acts only in an inflexibly straight line; it can guess right only on condition of never diverting its gaze; the freaks of chance disturb it.

  Honore de Balzac

  Thinking, Intuition, Sun

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• We cannot even reproduce our thoughts entirely in words.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Thinking, Language, Our Thoughts

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• Love is like some fresh spring, first a stream and then a river, changing its aspect and its nature as it flows to plunge itself in some boundless ocean, where restricted natures only find monotony, but where great souls are engulfed in endless contemplation.

  Honore de Balzac

  Love, Spring, Ocean

  Honore de Balzac (2011). “The Magic Skin: Or The Wild Ass's Skin”, p.121, The Floating Press

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• A slight wind shakes the seed-pods
  my thoughts are spent
  as the black seeds.

  Hilda Doolittle

  Thinking, Wind, Black

  Hilda Doolittle, Louis L. Martz (1986). “Collected Poems 1912-1944”, p.10, New Directions Publishing

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• Always strive to find out what to do by thinking, without asking anybody. If you continually do this, you will soon act like a grown-up woman. For want of doing this, a very great number of grown-up people act like children.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Children, Thinking, Numbers

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• One might feel that, at my age, I should look on life with more gravity. After all, I've been privileged to listen, firsthand, tosome of the most profound thinkers of my daywho were all beset by gloom over the condition the world had gotten into. Then why can't I view it with anything but amusement?

  Anita Loos

  Funny, Thinking, Views

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• I summon to the winding ancient stair;
  Set all your mind upon the steep ascent

  William Butler Yeats

  Thinking, Mind, Ascent

  William Butler Yeats (2012). “The Winding Stair and Other Poems: A Facsimile Edition”, p.4, Simon and Schuster

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• Outrage is easy, cheap, and oversold. The nation needs less anger and more thoughtful reflection, less shouting and more listening, less dissembling and more honesty.

  Mario Cuomo

  Honesty, Reflection, Listening

  Mario Cuomo (2012). “Reason to Believe”, p.11, Simon and Schuster

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• Man's life is thought,
  And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
  Ravening through century after century,
  Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
  Into the desolation of reality.

  William Butler Yeats

  Life, Men, Thinking

  William Butler Yeats (2001). “The Major Works”, p.151

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• An immoderate fondness for dress, for pleasure, and for sway, are the passions of savages; the passions that occupy those uncivilized beings who have not yet extended the dominion of the mind, or even learned to think with the energy necessary to concatenate that abstract train of thought which produces principles.... that women from their education and the present state of civilized life, are in the same condition, cannotbe controverted.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Passion, Thinking, Train Of Thought

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• The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stoodthere from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.

  William James

  Block, Thinking, Data

  William James (2012). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.288, Courier Corporation

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• If thinking is like perceiving, it must be either a process in which the soul is acted upon by what is capable of being thought, or a process different from but analogous to that. The thinking part of the soul must therefore be, while impassable, capable of receiving the form of an object; that is, must be potentially identical in character with its object without being the object. Mind must be related to what is thinkable, as sense is to what is sensible.

  Aristotle

  Character, Thinking, Soul

  Aristotle, Aeterna Press (2015). “On the Soul”, p.69, Aeterna Press

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