Quotations

“Our thought force has proved to be a wedge, opening the seemingly inaccessible Wall of Circumstance.”

Using a forceful metaphor for overcoming apparently immovable obstacles · Essay, Invincibility

“Control your morning thoughts. You can do it.”

A direct recommendation to begin the day deliberately rather than reactively · Essay, Morning Influences

“I know nothing, I have studied nothing; I have read a little, felt quite a lot and thought a great deal, though I cannot say whether well or badly.”

Original: Yo nada sé, nada he estudiado; he leído un poco, he sentido bastante y he pensado mucho, aunque no acertaré á decir si bien ó mal. — His deliberately self-deprecating admission places lived experience and reflection above academic authority. · Letter I, Cartas literarias a una mujer (Spanish)

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

“It is obvious to me: I witness my thought coming into being; I watch it, I listen to it.”

Original: Cela m’est évident: j’assiste à l’éclosion de ma pensée: je la regarde, je l’écoute. — Rimbaud describes thought as an unfolding process that the poet observes rather than completely controls. · Letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871 (French)

Arthur Rimbaud

“Every witticism is an inexact thought; that which is perfectly true is imperfectly witty.”

Wit and truth as inversely related · Conversation / essay (as commonly attributed)

Walter Savage Landor

“You need only feel and think in order to understand me.”

Original: Como sólo de lo que he sentido y he pensado he de hablarte, te bastará sentir y pensar para comprenderme. — Understanding literature, in Bécquer's view, depends on shared human experience as much as intellectual analysis. · Letter I, Cartas literarias a una mujer (Spanish)

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

“Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite it the most powerfully and delightfully.”

Describing poetry as the deliberate shaping of thought into imaginative experience · Lecture, On the Nature of Poetry, 1825–26

William Cullen Bryant

“It is declaring against the most charming power of imagination, the most exalting force of thought, the most affecting touch of sentiment.”

Contempt of poetry treated as contempt of imagination itself · Preface to Winter, 1726

James Thomson

“Passion is waste — takes away from a man's stability, his self-centralization: its action on general culture, aestheticism, philosophy, manysidedness, all that makes life endurable, is ruinous.”

A strikingly severe youthful judgement on passion and its power to disturb intellectual self-possession · Marginalia on Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, c. 1889

Ernest Dowson

“Thought is eternal in its effects, and every hopeful thought which enters the mind sets vibrations in motion.”

Expressing her belief that constructive thought has consequences beyond the individual · Essay, Let the Past Go

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

“One rock versus a thousand pebbles.”

Contrasting the weight of old words with the scatter of modern speech · Letter to Frederic I. Carpenter, September 1943

Robinson Jeffers

“Thinking and doing, doing and thinking: that is the sum of all wisdom.”

Original: Denken und Tun, Tun und Denken, das ist die Summe aller Weisheit. — Goethe joins reflection and action as complementary parts of practical wisdom. · Maxims and Reflections (German)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“You hold the form of a poem of supreme importance; I believe in the supremacy of thought.”

Statement of poetics against rigid scansion and the heavy mechanism of verse · Letter to Alfred Gordon

Marjorie L. C. Pickthall

“War is the great scavenger of thought.”

A harsh claim that conflict clears intellectual stagnation · Wartime essay

Edmund William Gosse

“If a subject bores us, we are apt to avoid the trouble of thinking about it; but if we do that, we had better go further and avoid also the trouble of writing about it.”

A pointed defence of intellectual engagement before publication · Lecture, The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism, 1921

A.E.Housman

“The sooner we teach little children what a mighty truth lies in the Bible phrase As a man thinketh, so is he, the better for future generations.”

Emphasising the formative power of ideas in childhood education · Essay, Thought Force

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

“The mind is a mirror, not only reflecting, but itself creating, the forms of thought.”

Exploring the active rather than merely receptive nature of the human mind. · Essay, A Defence of Poetry

Percy Bysshe Shelley

“It is this vagueness of thought endeavoring to sound the foundation of all things, this want of definition, hinting at ideas that cannot be precisely expressed, that give to art its ultimate and finest significance.”

Valuing suggestion over exact statement · Camera Work essay

Sadakichi Hartmann

“How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.”

Finds the inner life more furnishing than the objects around it · Letter to Elsie Moll, 16 May 1907

Wallace Stevens

“Every least thought of the brain is a chisel, chipping away at our characters, and our characters are building our destinies.”

A memorable metaphor connecting repeated thoughts with character and destiny · Essay, Invincibility

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

“Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.”

Faith as a place reason cannot occupy · Sand and Foam, 1926

Kahlil Gibran

“Deep and serious thinkers have a difficult position before the public.”

Original: Tief und ernstlich denkende Menschen haben gegen das Publikum einen bösen Stand. — Goethe observes the tension between serious thought and the demands of public opinion. · Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years (German)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe