Quotes about thinking

Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.

To meditate is to labour; to think is to act. Folded arms work, closed hands perform, a gaze fixed on heaven is a toil.

A man is not idle, because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labour and there is an invisible labour.

There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity consists, then, in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavour, then, to think well; this is the principle of morality.

"Once you let people know anything about what you think, that's it, you're dead. Then they'll be jumping about in your mind, taking things out, holding them up to the light and killing them, yes, killing them, because thoughts are supposed to stay and grow in quiet, dark places, like butterflies in cocoons”. (Page 82)

I had only my thoughts to occupy me, and they were not good company.

Although he was not spared the perplexities of the life of the mind, it was given to him to experience without personal bitterness the tragedy inherent in every life consecrated to thought.

Newton was not the first man who saw an apple fall. His fame was based on his being the first to understand its implications.

There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.

My mind is like a room where the door swings free in the breeze, and many visitors come and go and stay and vanish as they will.

“It is better to know nothing,” wrote Claude Bernard in An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, “than to keep in mind fixed ideas based on theories whose confirmation we constantly seek, neglecting meanwhile everything that fails to agree with them.”