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Thought Quotes

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Thought Quotes

“I, too, head for the Baths of Caracalla, thinking—with my old, magnificent privilege of thinking… (And let there still be a god in me that thinks, lost, weak, and childish, yet whose voice is so human it is almost a song.) Oh, to leave this prison of poverty! To be free of the yearning that makes these ancient nights so splendid! He who knows yearning, and he who does not, have something in common: man’s desires are humble.”

ThoughtYearningCaracalla
Book:Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini, The: A Bilingual Edition
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“I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone. On the other hand, when I got drunk I screamed, went crazy, got all out of hand. One kind of behavior didn’t fit the other. I didn’t care”

InspirationalThoughtLoner
Author:Charles Bukowski
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“Watch a man--say, a politician--being interviewed on television, an you are observing a demonstration of what both he and his interrogators learned in school: all questions have answers, and it is a good thing to give an answer even if there is none to give, even if you don't understand the question, even if the question contains erroneous assumptions, even if you are ignorant of the facts required to answer. Have you ever heard a man being interviewed say, "I don't have the faintest idea," or "I don't know enough even to guess," or "I have been asked that question before, but all my answers to it seem to be wrong?" One does not "blame" men, especially if they are politicians, for providing instant answers to all questions. The public requires that they do, since the public has learned that instant answer giving is the most important sign of an educated man.”

PoliticsEducationKnowledgeTelevisionThoughtInterviewsPoliticiansCritical ThinkingSubversionRecall
Author:Neil Postman
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“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;”

RealityDesireImpossibleExpectationsThoughtInsaneConception
Book:The Gambler
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“I don't know" is not confusion. Confusion is "I don't know, but I should know" or "I don't know, but I need to know." When you fully accept that you don't know, you actually enter a state of peace and clarity that is closer to who you truly are than thought could ever be. Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.”

PeaceThoughtConfusionClarity
Book:A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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“More than ninety-five percent of your brain activity, as you consciously read this sentence, is being used by your subconscious mind.”

ThinkingMindConsciousnessPsychologySelf EsteemThoughtSubconsciousMind PowerQuantum PhysicsQuantum MechanicsHuman BrainSubconscious MindSelf ConceptSubconscious Mind PowerParallel UniversesMany WorldsMany Worlds InterpretationHugh EverettWave FunctionQuantum JumpingBohrBrain Activity
Book:Moving Through Parallel Worlds To Achieve Your Dreams
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“It is well understood in psychology that the subconscious mind has the dominant influence on human decision making, and therefore the pivotal role of the subconscious, for you to achieve success, is inescapable.”

SuccessSelf EsteemAchievementThoughtDecision MakingSubconsciousQuantum PhysicsQuantum MechanicsHuman BrainSubconscious MindSelf ConceptSubconscious Mind PowerThe MindParallel UniversesMany WorldsMany Worlds InterpretationHugh EverettWave FunctionQuantum JumpingBohr
Book:Moving Through Parallel Worlds To Achieve Your Dreams
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“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.”

LifeDeathPurposeNatureSurvivalSuicideInstinctThoughtMeaning Of LifeReasoningSurviveLife Force
Book:I Am Legend
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“Self-reflection or autognosis reveals that what is given in consciousness is, first and foremost, integral connectedness and organic unity of all thinking, feeling, and desiring. At the same time, self-reflection reveals that this connected unity is the ultimate reality that can be reached. "Consciousness cannot go behind itself." Whatever we propose to think forms part of this organic unity of our mind and is a result or consequence of it. There is no means of jumping beyond consciousness, and any attempt to explain with the help of any other imaginary system the radical connectedness in which we live and that is our mind would be absurd. Our mind is the very presupposition of all explanation. For to explain a phenomenon means, in the last instance, to point out its place and its part within the living economy of consciousness, and to determine the "meaning" it has in the original source of all meaning: life.”

LifeMindPhilosophyConsciousnessPsychologyThoughtMeaning
Author:José Ortega y Gasset
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“An editor doesn't just read, he reads well, 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 (scribere = "to write"); and the symbol for Nisaba, the Mesopotamian goddess of scribes, was not a tablet but a stylus. In his excellent book A History of Reading, 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.”

WritingReadingBooksThoughtWritersEditingFreedom Of ThoughtRevision
Book:The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself
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“One of the difficulties of thinking clearly about anything is that it is almost impossible not to form our ideas in words which have some previous association for us; with the result that our thought is already shaped along certain lines before we have begun to follow it out. Again, a word may have various meanings, and our use of it in one sense may deceive our readers (or even ourselves) into supposing that we were using it in some other sense.”

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Book:Peace with Honour
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