Thoughts Quotes

Great thoughts come from the heart.

Even a thought, even a possibility, can shatter us and transform us.

transformation possibility

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

action

Our thoughts are epochs in our lives; all else is but as a journal of the winds that blow while we are here.

If a man speaks or acts with pure thought, happiness follows him like a shadow that never leaves him.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.

Our own worst enemy cannot harm us as much as our unwise thoughts. No man can help us as much as our own compassionate thoughts.

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

morals

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.

We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.

A man is but a product of his thoughts; what he thinks, that he becomes.

What was once thought can never be unthought.

Man is a plant which bears thoughts, just as a rose-tree bears roses and an apple-tree in bears apples.

All that a man achieves and all that he fails to achieve is the direct result of his own thoughts.

achievement

Conversation is the legs on which thought walks; and writing, the wings by which it flies.

conversation writing

I am a farmer of thoughts, and all the crops I raise I give away.

The fingers of your thoughts are molding your face ceaselessly.

face

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

art genius

They [great ideas] are the mightiest influence on earth.  One great thought breathed into a man may regenerate him.

ideas

It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.

intellect

There are thoughts which are prayers.  There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.

kneeling prayer

High thoughts must have high language.

language

All honest thought is a form of prayer.

prayer

It is amazing how much a thought expands and refines by being put into speech: I should think it could hardly know itself.

speech

Thoughts are acrobats, agile and quite often untrustworthy.

If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.

Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.

Great thoughts, like great deeds, need
No trumpet.

Thought itself needs words.  It runs on them like a long wire.

words

One thought fills immensity.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber.

Thoughts can hurt like real pain.

Thoughts are timid things.  They are frightened away by noise and they make none themselves.  They flutter as silently as do owls on soft-edged wings.

Thoughts are odd misfires.

It is sometimes better to slip over thoughts and not go to the bottom of them.

Thought is the seed of action.

In the effort to unfold our thought to a friend we make it clearer to ourselves.

Thought is behavior in rehearsal.

The history of thought is the history of an ever-increasing approximation to the truth.

Borrowed thoughts, like borrowed money, only show the poverty of the borrower.

For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take firm root in our personal experience.

thinking

First thoughts have tremendous energy.  It is the way the mind first flashes on something.

Thought precedes action, as lightning does thunder.

Nobody has ever seen an electron. Nor a thought. You can't see a thought; you can't measure, weigh, nor taste it—but thoughts are the most real things in the Galaxy.

More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth.

We are always in search of the redeeming formula, the crystallizing thought.

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money.

Thought forms in the soul the same way clouds form in the air.

A thought is a thing as real as a cannon ball.

My thoughts are my company; I can bring them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them.

Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man.  But they don't bite everybody.

The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have.

A thought often makes us hotter than a fire.

There are two distinct classes of what are called Thoughts: those that we produce in ourselves by reflection and the act of thinking, and those that bolt into the mind of their own accord.

Words are the small change of thought.

words

Every thought vibrates through the universe.

It takes a long time for words to become thought.

My thoughts are like waffles—the first few don't look so good.

A man may dwell so long upon a thought that it may take him prisoner.

A word is the carving and coloring of a thought, and gives it permanence.

words

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

words

I have no riches but my thoughts,
Yet these are wealth enough for me.

Associate reverently and as much as you can with your loftiest thoughts.  Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg, by the side of which more will be laid.

It has never struck me as harmful to make a conscious effort to elevate one's thoughts, in the hope that by doing so one's writing will get off the ground, even if only for a few seconds (like Orville Wright) and to a low altitude.

I hold it true that thoughts are things
Endowed with bodies, breath, and wings,
And that we send them forth to fill
The world with good results—or ill.

The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.

You cannot escape the results of your thoughts. Whatever your present environment may be, you will fall, remain or rise with your thoughts, your vision, your ideal. You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspiration.

aspiration

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

What we think, we become.

Spiritually, a man's thoughts must be the building in which he lives—otherwise it is wrong.

philosophy