Great Throughts Treasury

"Thought is a prelude to, and not an alternative to action." - Antony Jay, fully Sir Antony Rupert Jay

"Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter - not of course our individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms out of which our individual minds have grown exist as thought." -

"I incline to the idealistic theory that consciousness is fundamental, and that the material universe is derivative from consciousness... In general the universe seems to me to be nearer to a great thought than a great machine." -

"The universe seems to be nearer a great thought than a great machine." -

"'Tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than open one's mouth and remove all doubt." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." -

"People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid." -

"Moral thought seems to behave like all other kinds of thought. Progress through the moral levels and stages is characterized by increasing differentiation and increasing integration, and hence is the same kind of progress that scientific theory presents." - Lawrence Kohlberg

"Everything has been said, and we are more than seven thousand years of human thought too late." -

"A single grateful thought toward Heaven is the most perfect prayer." - Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

"Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own." - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

"Supported by the authority of all institutions, parenthood has come to amount to little more than a campaign against individuality. Every father and every mother trembles lest an offspring, in act or thought, should be different from his fellows; and the smallest display of uniqueness in a child becomes the signal for the application of drastic measures aimed at stamping out that small fire of noncompliance by which personal distinctness is expressed. In an atmosphere of anxiety, in a climate of apprehension, the parental conspiracy against children is planned." - Robert M. Linder, fully Robert Mitchell Linder

"I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts." - John Locke

"The dependence upon corporate advertising of the mass media – newspapers, magazines, radio and television – makes them editorially subservient, without in any way being prompted, to points of view known or thought to be favored by the big property owners… The willing subservience shows itself most generally, apart from specific acts of omission or commission, in an easy blandness on the part of the mass media toward serious social problems." - Ferdinand Lundberg

"We are bound together by a more primitive and fundamental unity than any unity of thought and doctrine; we all have the same human nature and, considered in their extra-mental reality, the same primordial tendencies." - Jacques Maritain

"The world’s inability to achieve a unity of thought and to end spiritual divisions is the real reason society is so deeply unhappy, so poor in ideas and enthusiasm, and so lacking in shared spiritual concepts which are its own inner joy, nobility and strength." - Barrett McGurn

"This world is a most holy Temple, into which man is brought there to behold Statues and Images, not wrought by mortal hands, but such as by the secret thought of God hath made sensible, as intelligible unto us." -

"It was so important to think quiet loving thought about people in idle moments, especially perhaps about the dead, who being substanceless so desperately need our thoughts." - Iris Murdoch, aka Dame Jean Iris Murdoch

"The Law of Attraction attracts to you everything you need, according to the nature of your thought life. Your environment and financial condition are the perfect reflection of your habitual thinking. Thought rules the world." - Joseph Murphy

"A linear medium cannot represent the simultaneity of processing that goes on in the brain – the mixture of language and image, the intimation of diverging possibilities that we experience as free will. It cannot capture the secrets of organization by which the inanimate somehow comes to life, by which the neural passageway becomes the thought." - Janet H. Murray

"God must not be thought of as a physical being, or as having any kind of body. He is pure mind. He moves and acts without needing any corporeal space, or size, or form, or color, or any other property of matter." -

"Sanity was statistical; it was merely a question of learning to think as they thought." -

"The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it… Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller." -

"An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought." -

"Virtue linked with thought, occupying a Soul, makes God manifest: God o the lips without good conduct of life is only a word." -

"The world is not an illusion; it is not nothingness, for it is willed by God and therefore is real… The reality of the world is not in itself but it is in the thought and being of the Creator. It is what God thought and willed it to be before it was." - Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, fully Sir or Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

"In a moment of extreme danger things can be done which have previously been thought impossible. Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas." - Erwin Rommel, fully Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel

"If Jewish thought had never existed the world would have been without Christianity and Islam." - Leon Roth

"Faith is not a dam which prevents the flow of the river of reason and thought; it is a levee which prevents unreason from flooding the countryside." - Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen

"After my death, my thought will still smile at every mystery from which the cover has been ripped." - Zalman Shneour

"Children are happy because they live life abundantly. They put no limitations upon life whatever. The moment we put limitation upon life we cease to life abundantly. There is not a limiting condition in life. Life could not limit itself. It could not be kept away except through your own attitude of thought toward it." - Baird T. Spalding

"Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?" - Tom Stoppard, fully Sir Tom Stoppard, born Tomáš Straüssler

"“To believe your own thought,” observed Emerson, “to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men – that is genius.” But to impose what you believe is true for you upon all men, indeed upon a single individual – that is despotism." -

"Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought." - Albert Szent-Gyorgi

"Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought." - Albert Szent-Gyorgi

"Man has unveiled secrets which might have been thought undiscoverable. Much has been achieved in the realm of art, science, literature, and religion. Is all this to end because so few are able to think of man rather than of this or that group of men?" - U Thant

"Those who pretend to know what they don’t, will be thought ignorant of even what they know." - Thiruvalluvar NULL

"Does any one really believe he can escape from the responsibility for what he has done and thought in secret?… The centre of our whole being is involved in the centre of all being; and the centre of all being rests in the centre of our being." -

"The past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that. And what is a grievance? The baggage of old thought and emotion." - Eckhart Tolle, born Ulrich Leonard Tolle

"Many will receive great help, and many will be entirely healed by a practice somewhat after the following nature: Wit a mind at peace, and with a heart going out in love to all, go into the quiet of your own interior self, holding the thought - I am one with the Infinite Spirit of Life, the life of my life. I then as spirit, I a spiritual being, can in my own real nature admit of no disease. I now open my body, in w2hich disease has obtained a foothold, I open it fully to the inflowing tide of this Infinite Life, and it now, even now, is pouring in and coursing through my body, and the healing process is going on. Realize this so fully that you begin to feel a quickening and a warming glow imparted by the life forces to the body. Believe the healing process is going on. Believe it, and hold continually to it. Many people greatly desire a certain thing but expect something else. They have greater faith in the power of evil than in the power of good, and hence they remain ill." - Ralph Waldo Trine

"Article 18 - Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others, and in public or in private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance." - United Nations NULL

"Religion is not necessary to give meaning to life, thought it is necessary to any claim that there is one state or being of supreme intrinsic value, and there is one overridingly important human purpose and that is an objective, morally ordered pattern." - Keith Ward

"Talent repeats; Genius creates. Talent is a cistern; Genius, a fountain… Talent accumulates knowledge, and has it packed up in the memory; Genius assimilates it with its own substance, grows with every new accession, and converts knowledge into power. Talent gives out what it has taken in; Genius, what has risen from its unsounded wells of living thought." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal. This is the thought of identity – yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual and vaguest of earth’s dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to all facts. In such devout hours, in the midst of the significant wonders of heaven and earth, (significant only because of the Me in the center), creeds, conventions, fall away and become of no account before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable, once liberated and look’d upon, it expands over the whole earth, and spreads to the roof of heaven." -

"The overall similarity between mathematics and nature must have a deeper origin, both involving processes that can be thought of as computations." - Stephen Wolfram

"Faith in life endless, the sustaining thought of human Being, Eternity, and God." - William Wordsworth

"I felt the sentiment of Being spread o’er all that moves and all that seemeth still; o’er that, lost beyond the reach of thought and human knowledge, to the human eye invisible, yet liveth to the heart." - William Wordsworth

"True dignity abides with him alone who, in the silent hour of inward thought, can still suspect, and still revere himself, in lowliness of heart." - William Wordsworth

"He searches all around for his thought. But what thought? It is either passionate, or hateful, or confused. What about the past, future or present? What is past that is extinct, what is future that has not yet arrived, and the present has no stability. For thought, Kasyapa, cannot be apprehended, inside, or outside, or in between both. For thought is immaterial, invisible, nonresisting, inconceivable, unsupported, and homeless. Thought has never been seen by any of the Buddhas, nor do they see it, nor will they see it. And what the Buddhas never see, how can that be an observable process, except in the sense that dharmas proceed by the way of mistaken perception? Thought is like a magical illusion; by an imagination of what is actually unreal it takes hold of a manifold variety of rebirths. A thought is like the stream of a river, without any staying power; as soon as it is produced it breaks up and disappears. A thought is like a flame of a lamp, and it proceeds through causes and conditions. A thought is like lightning, it breaks up in a moment and does not stay on... Can thought review thought? No, thought cannot review thought. As the blade of a sword cannot cut itself, so a thought cannot see itself. Moreover, vexed and pressed hard on all sides, thought proceeds, without any staying power, like a monkey or like the wind. It ranges far, bodiless, easily changing, agitated by the objects of sense, with the six sense-fields for its sphere, connected with one thing after another. The stability of thought, its one-pointedness, its immobility, its undistraughtness, its one-pointed calm, its nondistraction, that is on the other hand called mindfulness as to thought." - Satipatthana Sutra NULL

"A lively, disinterested, persistent looking for truth is extraordinarily rare. Action and faith enslave thought, both of them in order not to be troubled or inconvenienced by reflection, criticism or doubt" -