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66fc01e If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. thought Haruki Murakami
ef9d805 But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. power-of-words propaganda thought George Orwell
d87db97 As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking. stereotypes men feminism self-determination women empowerment intelligence dignity social-norms misogyny hypocrisy double-standards gender thought Virginia Woolf
077118a Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone? people friendship love philosophy possibility important thought Haruki Murakami
8fa06b9 I like the scientific spirit--the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine--it always keeps the way beyond open--always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake--after a wrong guess. doubt science life scientific guess certainty skepticism humble evidence mistake ideas surrender thought Walt Whitman
a976fc4 How frail the human heart must be--a mirrored pool of thought. human-heart thought Sylvia Plath
35efd73 Accidental sex. He made it sound like I fell down, and there just happened to be an erection in the way. sexual thought Laurell K. Hamilton
62b4f04 Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly. library writing bible science bitter childish-beliefs guides invade uneducated unimaginative unthinking guide childish leader leaders imagine ignore home resentment ignorance shame thought the-bible school Isaac Asimov
122c537 We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought. cognition senses sociality community communication speech thought Oliver Sacks
69acdf0 is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism. suffering truth feeling thinking thought Milan Kundera
3cb419f Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility. action responsibility inspirational thought Dietrich Bonhoeffer
6fcfc3d Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard. writing precision creative-process thinking thought David McCullough
a3b4651 Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life. life speech thought Hermann Hesse
92f5b09 Thought is free. freedom-of-thought thought William Shakespeare
793b39b Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery. It is far better to be free, to leave the forts and barricades of fear, to stand erect and face the future with a smile. It is far better to give yourself sometimes to negligence, to drift with wave and tide, with the blind force of the world, to think and dream, to forget the chains and limitations of the breathing life, to forget purpose and object, to lounge in the picture gallery of the brain, to feel once more the clasps and kisses of the past, to bring life's morning back, to see again the forms and faces of the dead, to paint fair pictures for the coming years, to forget all Gods, their promises and threats, to feel within your veins life's joyous stream and hear the martial music, the rhythmic beating of your fearless heart. And then to rouse yourself to do all useful things, to reach with thought and deed the ideal in your brain, to give your fancies wing, that they, like chemist bees, may find art's nectar in the weeds of common things, to look with trained and steady eyes for facts, to find the subtle threads that join the distant with the now, to increase knowledge, to take burdens from the weak, to develop the brain, to defend the right, to make a palace for the soul. This is real religion. This is real worship free slavery weak worship dream joy future fear heart inspirational development feeling reform facts purpose gods burden threat knowledge thought Robert Green Ingersoll
039008b What I learned on my own I still remember reading discovery learning education intelligence schooling thinking thought Nassim Nicholas Taleb
2aef816 People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. shallowness visible superficial invisible thought Oscar Wilde
9d70c57 Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness. surf ocean thought Raymond Chandler
69bcbd1 Sure it will hurt. But so what? Pain is just a state of mind. You can think your way out of anything, even pain. thought Rodman Philbrick
c7c0e58 For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them. thought George Eliot
cdd9abd Everything is true,' he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought.' 'Will you be all right?' 'I'll be all right,' he said, and thought, And I'm going to die. Both those are true, too. life truth thought Philip K. Dick
bd811f1 Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An 'instinct' in as unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man's desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love of life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer--and that is the way he has acted through most of history. man life human-nature instincts thought Ayn Rand
607f1e4 Siddhartha has one single goal-to become empty, to become empty of thirst, desire, dreams, pleasure and sorrow-to let the Self die. No longer to be Self, to experience the peace of an emptied heart, to experience pure thought-that was his goal. life siddhartha self thought Hermann Hesse
846c05b Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place. the-myth-of-sisyphus thinking thought Albert Camus
a429e44 I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another. source thought Ludwig Wittgenstein
12d1771 Thinking can only serve to measure out the helplessness of thought. ego helplessness perception thinking thought H. Rider Haggard
b13b73b The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour. progress philosophical philosophy dressing innovation melancholy thinking thought introspection Ray Bradbury
c4b1d85 I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit. television reading writing pride thought Stephen King
bc9b18e "Isn't language loss a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world's people? Perhaps, but it's a bad thing in other respects. Languages differ in structure and vocabulary, in how they express causation and feelings and personal responsibility, hence in how they shape our thoughts. There's no single purpose "best" language; instead, different languages are better suited for different purposes. For instance, it may not have been an accident that Plato and Aristotle wrote in Greek, while Kant wrote in German. The grammatical particles of those two languages, plus their ease in forming compound words, may have helped make them the preeminent languages of western philosophy. Another example, familiar to all of us who studied Latin, is that highly inflected languages (ones in which word endings suffice to indicate sentence structure) can use variations of word order to convey nuances impossible with English. Our English word order is severely constrained by having to serve as the main clue to sentence structure. If English becomes a world language, that won't be because English was necessarily the best language for diplomacy." language thought Jared Diamond
9253092 "If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, "created of warm blood and nerves" as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life." writing thought short-stories Raymond Carver
28a84a5 While you can't control your experiences, you can control your explanations. optimism speculations thinking thought Martin E.P. Seligman
8f1b560 I was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness; it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die. live escape die thought John Green
c98c0d7 As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name--the --for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher .) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them to think also. enlightenment christianity religion education life assimilation chabad-messianism dialectics haskalah isaiah-berlin menachem-mendel-schneerson messianism moses-mendelssohn prohibitions rebbes rituals rabbis exile monotheism judaism old-testament germans free-thought return study ethics plagiarism prophecy atheism voltaire islam intellect antisemitism thought evil Christopher Hitchens
c12d7f6 We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence. silence death life thought Virginia Woolf
24ab8a6 For God's sake, let us be men not monkeys minding machines or sitting with our tails curled while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone. Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces. humanity reflection machines thought monkeys D.H. Lawrence
5c6597b All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shriveled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut. writing truth thought Anne Brontë
c86d402 We read the pagan sacred books with profit and delight. With myth and fable we are ever charmed, and find a pleasure in the endless repetition of the beautiful, poetic, and absurd. We find, in all these records of the past, philosophies and dreams, and efforts stained with tears, of great and tender souls who tried to pierce the mystery of life and death, to answer the eternal questions of the Whence and Whither, and vainly sought to make, with bits of shattered glass, a mirror that would, in very truth, reflect the face and form of Nature's perfect self. These myths were born of hopes, and fears, and tears, and smiles, and they were touched and colored by all there is of joy and grief between the rosy dawn of birth, and death's sad night. They clothed even the stars with passion, and gave to gods the faults and frailties of the sons of men. In them, the winds and waves were music, and all the lakes, and streams, and springs,--the mountains, woods and perfumed dells were haunted by a thousand fairy forms. They thrilled the veins of Spring with tremulous desire; made tawny Summer's billowed breast the throne and home of love; filled Autumns arms with sun-kissed grapes, and gathered sheaves; and pictured Winter as a weak old king who felt, like Lear upon his withered face, Cordelia's tears. These myths, though false, are beautiful, and have for many ages and in countless ways, enriched the heart and kindled thought. But if the world were taught that all these things are true and all inspired of God, and that eternal punishment will be the lot of him who dares deny or doubt, the sweetest myth of all the Fable World would lose its beauty, and become a scorned and hateful thing to every brave and thoughtful man. winter perfection shakespeare true grief doubt passion nature joy fear past death dreams music hope life love truth hateful philosophies religion-myths scorn sacred-books brave tender fairy haunted pagan king-lear spring woods fable poetic mountains lake birth smiles deny eternity autumn punishment gods effort tears questions mystery beautiful throne summer thought delight william-shakespeare pleasure Robert G. Ingersoll
15e51da A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space. eros-the-bittersweet thinking knowledge thought Anne Carson
a43d42b Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about. recreation synthesis thought Neal Stephenson
9b6dd2a A certain amount of reverie is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It soothes the fever, occasionally high, of the brain at work, and produces in the mind a soft, fresh vapor that corrects the all too angular contours of pure thought, fills up the gaps and intervals here and there, binds them together, and dulls the sharp corners of ideas. But too much reverie submerges and drowns. Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie it's pleasure. To replace thought with reverie is to confound poison with nourishment. reverie intellect thought Victor Hugo
db7cdb3 We are losing the ability to understand anything that's even vaguely complex. understanding wisdom thought Chuck Klosterman
2534e95 ...he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I'm outside or is it all America? loneliness inspirational angstrom updike rabbit outside strangeness isolation thought Updike John
55338f6 The words are meaningless except in terms of feeling. Does anyone act as the result of thought or does feeling stimulate action and sometimes thought implement it. feeling thought John Steinbeck
91a84ac "I don't know what this great thing I'm meant to be doing is, and it looks to me as if I was supposed not to know. And I resent that, right? "The old me knew. The old me cared. Fine, so far so good. Except that the old me cared so much that he actually got inside his own brain--my own brain--and locked off the bits that knew and cared, because if I knew and cared I wouldn't be able to do it. [...] "But this former self of mine killed himself off, didn't he, by changing my brain? Okay, that was his choice. This new me has its own choices to make, and by a strange coincidence those choices involve not knowing and not caring about this big number, whatever it is. That's what he wanted, that's what he got. "Except this old self of mine tired to leave himself in control, leaving orders for me in the bit of my brain he locked off. Well, I don't want to know, and I don't want to hear them. That's my choice. I'm not going to be anybody's puppet, particularly not my own. [...] "The old me is dead! [...] Killed himself! The dead shouldn't hang about trying t0 interfere with the living." thought Douglas Adams
fe57ab8 People who take a long view of their lives and careers always seem to make much better decisions about their time and activities than people who give very little thought to the future. people future success life hard-decisions thought Brian Tracy
6e53f94 Why didn't you dare it before? he asked harshly. When I hadn't a job? When I was starving? When I was just as I am now, as a man, as an artist, the same Martin Eden? That's the question. I've been asking myself for many a day. My brain is the same old brain. And what is puzzling me is why they want me now. Surely they don't want me for myself, for myself the same olf self they did not want. They must want me for something else, for something that is outside of me, for something that is not I. Shall I tell you what that something is? It is for the recognition I have recieved. That recognition is not I. Then again for the money I have earned and am earnin. But money is not I. And is it for the recognition and money, that you now want me? love martin-eden thought Jack London
ba4bc77 Common sense is a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions, and one can find there anything that one like. thought Antonio Gramsci
6bf79cb As far as I am concerned, philosophic questioning is just as likely to make you confused and depressed as it is to improve your condition. philosophy thought Christopher Paolini
305acab Talk lives in a man's head, but sometimes it is very lonely because in the heads of many men there is nothing to keep it company - and so talk goes out through the lips. discourse thought Beryl Markham
99f111e It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought. thought Ludwig Wittgenstein
78f9986 When you cultivate a godly thought life your soul will shine and you will exhibit the presence of the Lord in you. god life exhibit shine godly presence cultivate lord christian thought soul Elizabeth George
199e211 The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books 'any old time they have a mind to,' libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will, in fact, preserve that freedom which is a far more important part of our lives than any ideology or orthodoxy, the freedom that dissolves orthodoxies and inspires solutions to the ever-changing challenges of the future. I hope that your library and mine will continue in this way to be dangerous for many years to come. libraries freedom ideas thought Edmund S. Morgan
6c6d7ad My own eyes try to sleep, but they don't. They stay wide awake as time snarls forward and silence drops down, like measured thought. sleep time silence thought Markus Zusak
160c564 Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen. criticism philosophy opinions thought Fernando Pessoa
f13e3ec They sell courage of a sort in the taverns. And another sort, though not for sale, a man can find in the confessional. Try the alehouses and the churches, Hugh. In either a man can be quiet and think. solitude drinking courage taverns withdrawal beer confession reflection quietness thought Ellis Peters
e366cf3 take a strict view of their excrements, and, from the colour, the odour, the taste, the consistence, the crudeness or maturity of digestion, form a judgment of their thoughts and designs; because men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent, as when they are at stool... thought Jonathan Swift
32dfdb4 The cause of my profound sense of incompatibility with others is, I believe, that most people think with their feelings, whereas I feel with my thoughts. For the ordinary man, to feel is to live, and to think is to know how to live. For me, to think is to live, and to feel is merely food for thought. thought Fernando Pessoa
b7c6684 Sometimes it happens that the most insane thought, the most impossible conception, will become so fixed in one's head that at length one believes the thought or the conception to be reality. Moreover, if with the thought or the conception there is combined a strong, a passionate, desire, one will come to look upon the said thought or conception as something fated, inevitable, and foreordained--something bound to happen. Whether by this there is connoted something in the nature of a combination of presentiments, or a great effort of will, or a self-annulment of one's true expectations, and so on, I do not know; reality impossible desire expectations thought insane Fyodor Dostoyevsky
191c3bc Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net. philosophy thought Vladimir Nabokov
43aca6b Besides, I seemed to hold two lives--the life of thought, and that of reality; and, provided the former was nourished with a sufficiency of the strange necromantic joys of fancy, the privileges of the latter might remain limited to daily bread, hourly work, and a roof of shelter. thought Charlotte Brontë
2bcfb40 Work on what is real rather than worry about what is unreal. mind women inspire god love unreal worry christian fake thought Elizabeth George
dd27801 Life had stepped into the place of theory and something quite different would work itself out in his mind. mind theory god life universal thought soul Fyodor Dostoyevsky
6d119bb That's the worst thing they do to you, to any of you. Whatever those brain lesions are all about, the worst damage is done before they even pick up the knife: You're all brainwashed into believing you're ugly. beauty brainwash think-on thought-provoking pretty thought ugly Scott Westerfeld
b79ee3f I want to talk about another kind of high country now in the world of thought, which in some ways, for me at least, seems to parallel or produce feelings similar to this, and call it the high country of the mind. If all of human knowledge, everything that's known, is believed to be an enormous hierarchic structure, then the high country of the mind is found at the uppermost reaches of this structure in the most general, the most abstract considerations of all. Few people travel here. There's no real profit to be made from wandering through it, yet like this high country of the material world all around us, it has its own austere beauty that to some people makes the hardships of traveling through it seem worthwhile. In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the enormous magnitude of questions asked, and to the answers proposed to these questions. The sweep goes on and on and on so obviously much further than the mind can grasp one hesitates even to go near for fear of getting lost in them and never finding one's way out. enlightenment philosophy high-country montana mountains wild meditation reflection consciousness awareness thought introspection Robert M. Pirsig
6c98529 Prayer is only another name for good, clean, direct thinking. When you pray, think well what you are saying, and make your thoughts into things that are solid. In that manner, your prayer will have strength, and that strength shall become part of you, mind, body, and spirit. prayer strength thought Richard Llewellyn
5de0b9f Uncouth, clannish, lumbering about the confines of Space and Time with a puzzled expression on his face and a handful of things scavenged on the way from gutters, interglacial littorals, sacked settlements and broken relationships, the Earth-human has no use for thinking except in the service of acquisition. He stands at every gate with one hand held out and the other behind his back, inventing reasons why he should be let in. From the first bunch of bananas, his every sluggish fit or dull fleabite of mental activity has prompted ; and his time has been spent for thousands of years in the construction and sophistication of systems of ideas that will enable him to excuse, rationalize, and moralize the grasping hand. His dreams, those priceless comic visions he has of himself as a being with concerns beyond the material, are no more than furtive cannibals stumbling round in an uncomfortable murk of emotion, trying to eat each other. Politics, religion, ideology -- desperate, edgy attempts to shift the onus of responsibility for his own actions: abdications. His hands have the largest neural representation in the somesthetic cortex, his head the smallest; but he's always trying to hide the one behind the other. greed human-nature thought M. John Harrison
4a61431 Language and hearing are seated in the cerebral cortex, the folded gray matter that covers the first couple of millimeters of the outer brain like wrapping paper. When one experiences silence, absent even reading, the cerebral cortex typically rests. Meanwhile, deeper and more ancient brain structures seem to be activated--the subcortical zones. People who live busy, noisy lives are rarely granted access to these areas. Silence, it appears, is not the opposite of sound. It is another world altogether, literally offering a deeper level of thought, a journey to the bedrock of the self. experiences silence reading world activated bedrock busy cerebral-cortex deeper gray-matter structures subcortical hearing sound brain noisy language ancient self thought journey Michael Finkel
f25e95c If we deny the need for thought, Moneo, as some do, we lose the powers of reflection; we cannot define what our senses report. If we deny the flesh, we unwheel the vehicle which bears us. But if we deny emotion, we lose all touch with our internal universe. It was emotions which I missed the most. mind emotion feeling thought Frank Herbert
d2e8459 "As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genuine rest, no one to talk to who was capable of understanding the complexity (simplicity) of the problem or the approaches to a tentative solution. There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or "terror in a lonely place," the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind. As a mathematician he was free from subjection to reality, free to impose his ideas and designs on his own test environment. The only valid standard for his work, its critical point (zero or infinity), was the beauty it possessed, the deft strength of his mathematical reasoning. THe work's ultimate value was simply what it revealed about the nature of his intellect. What was at stake, in effect, was his own principle of intelligence or individual consciousness; his identity, in short. This was the infalling trap, the source of art's private involvement with obsession and despair, neither more nor less than the artist's self-containment, a mental state that led to storms of overwork and extended stretches of depression, that brought on indifference to life and at times the need to regurgitate it, to seek the level of expelled matter. Of course, the sense at the end of a serious effort, if the end is reached successfully, is one of lyrical exhilaration. There is air to breathe and a place to stand. The work gradually reveals its attachment to the charged particles of other minds, men now historical, the rediscovered dead; to the main structure of mathematical thought; perhaps even to reality itself, the so-called sum of things. It is possible to stand in time's pinewood dust and admire one's own veronicas and pavanes." loneliness mind depression despair obsession art-creation concentration thought mental-health Don DeLillo
ee246c7 "An editor doesn't just read, he reads , and reading well is a creative, powerful act. The ancients knew this and it frightened them. Mesopotamian society, for instance, did not want great reading from its scribes, only great writing. Scribes had to submit to a curious ruse: they had to downplay their reading skills lest they antagonize their employer. The Attic poet Menander wrote: "those who can read see twice as well." Ancient autocrats did not want their subjects to see that well. Order relied on obedience, not knowledge and reflection. So even though he was paid to read as much as write messages, the scribe's title cautiously referred to writing alone ( = "to write"); and the symbol for Nisaba, the Mesopotamian goddess of scribes, was not a tablet but a stylus. In his excellent book , Alberto Manguel writes, "It was safer for a scribe to be seen not as one who interpreted information, but who merely recorded it for the public good." In their fear of readers, ancients understood something we have forgotten about the magnitude of readership. Reading breeds the power of an independent mind. When we read well, we are thinking hard for ourselves--this is the essence of freedom. It is also the essence of editing. Editors are scribes liberated to not simply record and disseminate information, but think hard about it, interpret, and ultimately, influence it." reading writing editing revision freedom-of-thought thought writers Susan Bell
e4b4a34 I didn't flee a dictator or swim an ocean to be an American like some do. I just thought long and hard about it. citizenship thought Craig Ferguson
4b348df Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives. metaphor self-knowledge illusion freedom reason cognitive-science embodied-mind limitation thought George Lakoff
50cfd6d This road will be new because you will see a given emotion as a choice rather than a condition of life. emotion thought Wayne W. Dyer
686efc7 Once started, love couldn't easily be stopped. love not-easy thought-to-ponder thought Larry McMurtry
88ef2b5 "Many things the gods achieve beyond our judgement,'" said the sorrowful girl. "'What we thought is not confirmed and what we thought not God contives." religion knowledge thought John Irving
9345fba ...for it is often to be observed of the shallower men, that they are the very last to despond. It is the glory of the bladder that nothing can sink it; it is the reproach of a box of treasure, that once overboard it must drown thought soul Herman Melville
a0633e4 The crisis besetting America is not just an economic or political crisis; something deeper is wreaking havoc across the land, a mercenary and utilitarian attitude that demonstrates little empathy for people's actual well-being, that dismisses imagination and thought, branding passion for knowledge as irrelevant. imagination thought Azar Nafisi
50c2cc0 [T]he concern of man is not his future but his present, not the world but his soul. We must be just, we must strive, we must engage ourselves with the business of the world for our own sake, because through that, and through contemplation in equal measure, our soul is purified and brought closer to the divine. ... Thought and deed conjoined are crucial. ... The attempt must be made; the outcome is irrelevant. Right action is a pale material reflection of the divine, but reflection it is, nonetheless. Define your goal and exert reason to accomplish it by virtuous action; successs or failure is secondary. mankind present future success philosophy purification deeds souls goals divinity failure thought Iain Pears
357e9dc You despise the real bourgeois classes for all their snobbishness and their snobbish voices and ways. You do, don't you? Yet all you put in their place is a horrid little refusal to have nasty thoughts or do nasty things or be nasty in any way. Do you know that every great thing in the story of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that? hatred thoughts feelings passion beauty life love truth bourgeois despise horrid refusal snobbish snob classes nasty snobbishness class beautiful thought John Fowles
21606da She had lost herself in this old work, her personality dissolving into it, so that she had been set free. The immortality of the soul lies in its dissolution; this was the cryptic comment that so frustrated Olivier and which Julien had only ever grasped as evidence for the history of a particular school of thought. He had known all about its history, but Julia knew what it meant. He found the realization strangely reassuring. immortality freedom meaning philosophy self-abandonment liberation thought soul Iain Pears
a55c0de Revenge and rational thought never sleep together. revenge thought Kevin Hearne
9e31598 "The brain is not nourished on beans and truffles but rather the food manages to reconstitute the molecules of the brain once it has been turned into homogeneous and assimilable substances, which potentially have the "same nature", as the molecules of the brain" diet you-are-what-you-eat thought Antonio Gramsci
4868850 God, He didn't write the scripts for the puny little players down here. We wrote them ourselves-with each day we lived, each word we spoke, each thought we etched on our brains. And Momma had written her script, too. And a sorry one it was. living god life down-here each-day scripts spoke written spoken-words speaking players mothers thought V.C. Andrews
e939939 Power rests on the kind of knowledge one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless? philosphy life-lessons life power thought Carlos Castaneda
7ab5131 Up there in that room, as I see it, is the reading and the thinking-through, a theory of rivers, of trees moving, of falling light. Here on the river, as I lurch against a freshening of the current, is the practice of rivers. In navigating by the glow of the Milky Way, the practice of light. In steadying with a staff, the practice of wood. nature spirit practice meditation thought Barry Lopez
6b9862c "It's funny, leaving a place, ain't it?" he said. "You never do know when you'll get back." funny-idea getting-back going-somewhere leaving-a-place never-know thought-to-ponder missed ride leaving leave traveling home thought journey Larry McMurtry
65b0769 "Last night I thought about all that kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before." He got out of bed. "It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it's all over." "Let me alone," said Mildred. "I didn't do anything." "Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were bothered? About something important, about something real?" time world books reality work life bother kerosene lifetime reality-check observation real important create ignorance destruction thought creativity creation Ray Bradbury
ae181ef What a huge inaccessible lumber-room of thought and experience we amounted to, I thought; how much we are, how little we transmit. life inner-life thought H.G. Wells
39be2a2 And if I am not mistaken here is the secret of the greatness that was Spain. In Spain it is men that are the poems, the pictures and the buildings. Men are its philosophies. They lived, these Spaniards of the Golden Age; they felt and did; they did not think. Life was what they sought and found, life in its turmoil, its fervour and its variety. Passion was the seed that brought them forth and passion was the flower they bore. But passion alone cannot give rise to a great art. In the arts the Spaniards invented nothing. They did little in any of those they practised, but give a local colour to a virtuosity they borrowed from abroad. Their literature, as I have ventured to remark, was not of the highest rank; they were taught to paint by foreign masters, but, inapt pupils, gave birth to one painter only of the very first class; they owed their architecture to the Moors, the French and the Italians, and the works themselves produced were best when they departed least from their patterns. Their preeminence was great, but it lay in another direction: it was a preeminence of character. In this I think they have been surpassed by none and equalled only by the ancient Romans. It looks as though all the energy, all the originality, of this vigorous race had been disposed to one end and one end only, the creation of man. It is not in art that they excelled, they excelled in what is greater than art--in man. But it is thought that has the last word. literature character creation-of-man spaniards the-golden-age the-last-word art thought W. Somerset Maugham
11b6adb She had to strive to make every thought obedient to the love of Christ whatever violent feelings churned within her. She had to take her every thought captive to the obedience of Christ and leave no room for anger and jealousy and thoughts of revenge. jealousy revenge love obedient christ thought Francine Rivers
4fe8f18 Most people are not naturally reflective any more than they are naturally malicious, and the white man prefers to keep the black man at a certain human remove because it is easier for him thus to preserve his simplicity and avoid being called to account for crimes committed by his forefathers, or his neighbors. racism blacks whites thoughtfulness race-relations reflection race guilt thought James Baldwin
da1b5b6 "She shakily rushed towards the car to find Alecto casually standing beside it, smoking a cigarette and staring fixedly on the radio as it played the song 'Draggin' the Line' by Tommy James, his expression thoughtful. "What are you thinking about?" Mandy questioned. "Wouldn't the world be a very loud place to live if we said everything we thought?" Alecto asked quietly." live mind world music song dragging tommy-james noisy cigarette line place quiet radio thinking question loud noise thought smoking Rebecca McNutt
b5ff7ef In that one stolen second, I considered the Glebe girl. She entered my mind like a burglar, them vanished again, taking nothing. It was like the humiliation of the past had been dragged instantly from my back and left somewhere on the ground. entered-my-mind taking-nothing vanished humiliation thought Markus Zusak
6010375 The years would pass like weeks, and loves would pass too, or else grow sour. love thought-to-ponder years passed thought Larry McMurtry
dda0c65 There is, after all, always something wonderful and touchingly beautiful about a young man, for the first time released from the bonds of schooling, making his first ventures toward the infinite horizon of the mind. At this point he has not yet seen any of his illusions dissipated, or doubted either his own capacity for endless dedication or the boundlessness of the world of thought. youth learning thought Hermann Hesse
139179d Worry, my son?...I am not worried now and I never have or will. You must learn to tell worry from thought, and thought from prayer. Sometimes a light will go from your life...and your life becomes a prayer, till you are strong enough to stand under the weight of your own thought again. strength-from-prayer worry thought Richard Llewellyn
1dc4b66 "Common sense is not a single unique conception, identical in time and space. It is the "folklore" of philosophy, and, like folklore, it takes countless different forms. Its most fundamental character is that it is a conception which, even in the brain of one individual, is fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential." -- philosophy thought Antonio Gramsci
51c1d87 To the Bullock Roseroot What's the thought you think all your life long? It must be a great one, a solemn one, to make you gaze through the world at it, all your life long. When you have to look aside from it your eyes roll, you bellow in anger, anxious to return to it, steadily to gaze at it, think it all your life long. poem thought Ursula K. Le Guin
82b8ced There seemed no answer. He wasn't resigned to anything, he hadn't accepted or adjusted to the life he'd been forced into. Yet here he was, eight months after the plague's last victim, nine since he's spoken to another human being, ten since Virginia had died. Here he was with no future and a virtually hopeless present. Still plodding on. Instinct? Or was he just stupid? Too unimaginative to destroy himself? Why hadn't he done it in the beginning when he was in the very depths? What had impelled him to enclose the house, install a freezer, a generator, an electric stove, a water tank, build a hothouse, a workbench, burn down the houses on each side of his, collect records and books and mountains of canned supplies, even - it was fantastic when you thought about it - even put a fancy mural on the wall? Was the life force something more than words, a tangible, mind-controlling potency? Was nature somehow, in him, maintaining its spark against its own encroachments? He closed his eyes. Why think, why reason? There was no answer. His continuance was an accident and an attendant bovinity. He was just too dumb to end it all, and that was about the size of it. suicide nature life life-force meaning-of-life survive reasoning purpose survival instinct thought Richard Matheson
bca19fe Reading has not gone out of fashion in the last number of years, nor in the ones while you slept in the asteroid belt. Your relatives do not wish to expose themselves to deep thought, lest they be affected by it. reading critical-thinking thought Anne McCaffrey
ff93de4 "There's the claim that the only progress made is in posing problems that scientists can answer. That philosophy never has the means to answer problems--it's just biding its time till the scientists arrive on the scene. You hear this quite often. There is, among some scientists, a real anti-philosophical bias. The sense that philosophy will eventually disappear. But there's a lot of philosophical progress, it's just a progress that's very hard to see. It's very hard to see because we see prejudice progress human-rights science philosophy animal-rights bigotry thinking thought Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
0d011a7 I've seen what rational thought leads to. Dumbest people I ever met were intellectuals. rational thought Robert Ferrigno
a7fc015 "DeWeese asks, 'Does this tie in with what you were doing on "Quality?"' 'It's the direct result of it,' I say. I remember something and look at DeWeese. 'Didn't you advise me to drop it?' 'I said no one had ever succeeded in doing what you were trying to do.' 'Do you think it's possible?' 'I don't know. Who knows?' His expression is really concerned. 'A lot of people are listening better these days. Particularly the kids. They're really listening... and not just at you- to you... to you. It makes all the difference." success thinking thought Robert M. Pirsig
4469757 The afternoon had passed to a ghostly gray. She was struck by the immensity of things, so much water and sky and forest, and after a time it occurred to her that she'd lived a life almost entirely indoors. Her memories were indoor memories, fixed by ceilings and plastered white walls. Her whole life had been locked to geometries: suburban rectangles, city squares. First the house she'd grown up in, then dorms and apartments. The open air had been nothing but a medium of transit, a place for rooms to exist. nature life indoors lake growing-up rooms sky house home thought Tim O'Brien
ad9643d ..I buried myself in accomplishments, because with accomplishments, I believed I could control things, I could squeeze in every last piece of happiness before I got sick and died.. which I figured was my natural fate. fate happy achieve death life perspective control thought Mitch Albom
9fcbed2 If some mystical clarity of thought came when you looked death in the eye, then I knew Morrie wanted to share it. And I wanted to remember it for as long as I could. ill time death share remember thought dying memory Mitch Albom
59df2a3 An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns - but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. storytelling thought Robert Bringhurst
6dfa1d4 What happened to me? I asked myself. Morris's high, smoky voice took me back to my university years, when I thought rich people were evil, a shirt and tie were prison clothes, and life without freedom to get up and go - motorcycle beneath you, breeze in your face, down the streets of Paris, into the mountains of Tibet - was not a good life at all. What happened to me? travel free life ideal young thought Mitch Albom
031167c By the mid-seventeenth century, the visible image has assumed far greater reality than the invisible thought. seventeenth-century visible invisible thought Thomas Cahill
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