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Thought Quotes

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Thought Quotes

“In consciousness, all realities exist only because the mind is in movement. When the mind becomes completely still, then the reality made possible by the senses, memories, ideas, fears, hopes, and dreams comes to an end. And so does conflict..”

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Book:Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience
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“1)In the simplest formulation, when we use a metaphor we have two thoughts of different things active together and supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction." ~ I. A. Richards 2)We believe a scientist because he can substantiate his remarks, not because he is eloquent and forcible in his enunciation. In fact, we distrust him when he seems to be influencing us by his manner. 3)Contempt is a well-recognized defensive reaction. 4)It is never what a poem says that matters, but what it is. 5)Thought is metaphoric, and proceeds by comparison, and the metaphors of language derive therefrom. I. A. Richards”

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Author:Ivor A. Richards
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“How does one do justice to what occasions philosophical wonder in us without conferring false sublimity upon it? We said that what occasions Frege’s wonder—the absoluteness of the logical order—seems to him to be such that it cannot possibly be implicated in our dependence upon language: say, in our meaning to assert p in using a proposition to say one thing rather than another, or in our using just these words rather than some others to assert it. The Tractatus (while repudiating Frege’s conception that the nature of logic may in no way be implicated in that of language) still seeks a way to hold onto the idea that in logic it is not we who express, by means of signs, what we want; rather it is the nature of the essentially necessary signs—it is logic—that asserts itself. The later Wittgenstein, as we are about to see, seeks to undo this residual subliming of the logical in the Tractatus, while in no way seeking to dissipate the sense of wonder at the illimitable depth of the logical—(what he later calls) the grammatical—that shows itself in our forms of thought and life.”

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Book:The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics
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“Intention is everything. Is there love in what a person says or is there underlying ill-will? Intention will determine the destined outcome of any situation. The same 'kind' words from one person can be a healing balm and from another, a sweet poison. The same 'harsh' words from one person can be malice and from another, save a life. The intention behind the words, action, or thought is always what makes it weak or strong, effective or ineffective, healing or harmful.”

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Book:Love, Devotion, and Longing
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“Note too that while professional philosophers are paid to scrutinize belief - to reveal hidden assumptions and bring attention to faulty inferences - that's not how most of us now, or our ancestors then, go about it. Many beliefs in most lives go unexamined.”

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Book:Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe
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“There is no thinking the form of thought from outside of thought. This yields a very different understanding of why there is no position from which we can do something which can qualify as 'apprehending a logically alien thought ' - where this is supposed to qualify as doing something that is at the same time a case of apprehending that which we do in thinking and a case of apprehending a form of activity that is comprehensible to us, as such, only from outside (only from a position that cannot be available to us in and through engaging in that form of activity).”

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Book:The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics
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“We shall never know whether thought is an imposture, and that is providential. 'The people is, in some cases, so enlightened that it is no longer indifferent to anything' (Montesquieu). That is indeed the end point: when there is no longer anything about which there is nothing to say. Verdict of a Chinese writer on a monstrous tree that is at once a blackberry and a bamboo: 'any disorder appearing in nature is the sign of a hidden disorder in the administration of the Empire ... Order restored in nature clearly indicates satisfaction in heaven.' Our current blossoming of monsters and clones, hybrids and chimeras, our systematic mixing of mores and cultures, sexes and genes, cannot but attest to an irremediable disorder in the highest spheres of the Empire.”

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Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“Thinking takes on first a conceptual, metaphorical form. Then a subjective, affective form. Then an animal, instinctive form. Then a reflex, automatic form. At that point, it is simply a function equivalent to the circulation of the blood and artificial respiration. Writing is the living alternative to the worst of what it says . There was a dramaturgy of art and language: transfiguring the real into lyricism and violence, giving history a heroic, bloodstained ending. It seems today that art and language have the opposite function of making everything conform to ordinariness: without end and without resolution.”

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Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“Lichtenberg speaks somewhere of the 'freedom to think, without danger, for the truth'. By this he doubtless understands the right of speaking the truth without the danger of being thrown into prison by the monarch. But if, by removing a comma, we read, instead, the freedom to think 'without danger for the truth', things become much more interesting. For then it becomes a question of the capacity to think without imperilling truth (without risk of unveiling it). It is no longer the freedom of thought at odds with power, but the truth itself at odds with the freedom to think. The whole relationship between thought and truth is at issue. There is a profound difference between the thought that wants to make truth shine out and the thought that wants to keep it secret. But you can also wish for both at the same time.”

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Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“The conscious decision to make a movement corresponds to an electrical event in the brain that happens 200 to 300 milliseconds after the beginning of the movement.' 'The experience of free determination of the will is nothing but an awareness of past events projected into the future' (Atlan). This precession of the act over the will, of the movement over the decision is interesting. It is the very question of thought: is there, in thought itself, something that precedes thought? More broadly, it is the question of the world: is there, before the Big Bang, something that precedes the world? This enquiry is essentially metaphysical. No point falling back on 'neuronal electricity'!”

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Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“Molto spesso l’attività intellettuale della donna si manifesta in un rimuginare il passato chiedendosi che cosa nella propria o nell'altrui esistenza avrebbe dovuto essere fatto diversamente, oppure nel costruire ossessivamente degli artificiosi nessi causali. Questo atteggiamento mentale viene di solito definito pensiero, mentre in realtà non è altro che una forma inutile e improduttiva di attività intellettuale, una specie di autotortura.”

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Book:Animus and Anima: Two Essays
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“Every day try to convert your reactions to responses. Reactions are always instinctive, whereas responses are always well thought of, just and right to save a situation from going out of hands, to avoid cracks in relationship, to avoid taking decisions in anger, anxiety, stress or hurry.”

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Book:small wins BIG SUCCESS: A handbook for exemplary success in post Covid19 Outbreak Era
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“We should look on man with wonder, conscious that his intellect, being infinite, is the image of the invisible God; and that even if it is for a time limited by the body, as St Basil says, it can embrace all form, just as God's providence embraces the whole universe. For the intellect has the ability to transform itself into everything, and is dyed with the form of the object it apprehends. But when it is taken up into God, who is formless and imageless, it becomes formless and imageless itself. Then we should marvel at how the intellect can preserve any thought or idea, and how an earlier thought need not be modified by later thoughts, or a later thought injured by earlier ones. On the contrary, the mind like a treasure-house tirelessly stores all thoughts. And these thoughts, whether new or long held in store, the intellect when it wishes can express in language; yet although words are always coming from it, it is never exhausted.”

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Author:St. Peter of Damascus
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“In the wake of scientific rationality, mind turns into a wave of noetic deracination. This deracination of thought and its noetic drift is commensurate with what Plato calls the Form of Good as the Form of Forms, since it sets up the scaffolding for a conception of the realm of intelligibilities as a complex system of recipes for crafting a world which includes not only satisfying lives but also the perpetual demand for the better.”

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Book:Intelligence and Spirit
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“My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn't look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn't want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think. So they ran off with the porches. And the gardens, too. Not many gardens any more to sit around in. And look at the furniture. No rocking?chairs any more. They're too comfortable. Get people up and running around. My uncle says . . . and . . . my uncle . . . and . . . my uncle . . .”

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Book:Fahrenheit 451
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“By then I’d already learned that thoughts sometimes come to us in words, and sometimes in images. There were some thoughts - such as a memory of running under the pouring rain, and how it felt - that I couldn’t even begin to put into words … Yet their image was clear in my mind. And there were other things that I could describe in words but were otherwise impossible to visualize: black light, my mother’s death, infinity.”

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Book:Kırmızı Saçlı Kadın
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“Descartes, of course, the French philosopher said: "I think therefore I am". If he had waited a little bit longer before saying anything, he could have come to the point of cessation of thinking and then he could have made the more profound statement: "I am conscious therefore I am". Thinking is only an expression of consciousness: a surface expression of consciousness.”

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Author:Eckhart Tolle
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