thoughts Quotes

“I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.”

“I couldn’t bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn’t think about nothing else.”

“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.”

“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

“I have observed this in my experience of slavery, - that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceased to be a man.”

One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts—just mere thoughts—are as powerful as electric batteries—as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body. If you let it stay there after it has got in you may never get over it as long as you live.

When new beautiful thoughts began to push out the old hideous ones, life began to come back to him, his blood ran healthily through his veins and strength poured into him.

“Thoughts - even fears - were airy things, formless until you made them solid with your voice and once given that weight, they could crush you.”

“Take special care that your thoughts remain unfettered. One may be a free man and yet be bound tighter than a slave.”

“Our thoughts become our words, our words become our beliefs, our beliefs become our actions, our actions become our habits, and our habits become our realities.”

“They’s times when how you feel got to be kep’ to yourself.”

“Scattered wits take a long time in picking up.”

“I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the ‘monkey mind’ — the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl.”

God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart forever; the vulture the very creature he creates.

“Many of the Ents are younger than I am, by many lives of trees. They are all roused now, and their mind is all on one thing: breaking Isengard. But they will start thinking again before long; they will cool down a little . . . But let them march now and sing! We have a long way to go, and there is time ahead for thought. It is something to have started.”

“Let them march now and sing! We have a long way to go, and there is time ahead for thought. It is something to have started.”

“We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought.”

“You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don’t know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself.”

“The secret of a better and more successful life is to cast out those old, dead, unhealthy thoughts. Substitute for them new vital, dynamic faith thoughts. You can depend upon it—an inflow of new thought will remake you and your life.”

“If happiness is determined by our thoughts it is necessary to drive off the thoughts which make for depression and discouragement.”

“We are beginning to comprehend a basic truth hitherto neglected, that our physical condition is determined very largely by our emotional condition, and our emotional life is profoundly regulated by our thought life.”

“Into your hands will be placed the exact results of your own thoughts; you will receive that which you earn; no more, no less.”

“Let a man radically alter his thoughts, and he will be astonished at the rapid transformation it will effect in the material conditions of his life.”

“impure thoughts of every kind crystallize into enervating and confusing habits, which solidify into distracting and adverse circumstances: thoughts of fear, doubt, and indecision crystallize into weak, unmanly, and irresolute habits, which solidify into circumstances of failure, indigence, and slavish dependence: lazy thoughts crystallize into habits of uncleanliness and dishonesty, which solidify into circumstances of foulness and beggary: hateful and condemnatory thoughts crystallize into habits of accusation and violence, which solidify into circumstances of injury and persecution: selfish thoughts of all kinds crystallize into habits of self-seeking, which solidify into circumstances more or less distressing. On the other hand, beautiful thoughts of all kinds crystallize into habits of grace and kindliness, which solidify into genial and sunny circumstances: pure thoughts crystallize into habits of temperance and self-control, which solidify into circumstances of repose and peace: thoughts of courage, self-reliance, and decision crystallize into manly habits, which solidify into circumstances of success, plenty, and freedom: energetic thoughts crystallize into habits of cleanliness and industry, which solidify into circumstances of pleasantness:”

“As he thinks, so he is; as he continues to think, so he remains.”

“When a man makes his thoughts pure, he no longer desires impure food.”

“Act is the blossom of thought; and joy and suffering are its fruits; thus does a man garner in the sweet and biter fruitage of his own husbandry”

“And when she gained the privacy of her own little shack she stayed on her knees so long she forgot she was there herself. There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought. Nanny entered this infinity of conscious pain again on her old knees.”

“And time after time, his smile became more similar to the ferryman’s, became almost just as bright, almost just as thoroughly glowing with bliss, just as shining out of thousand small wrinkles, just as alike to a child’s, just as alike to an old man’s. Many travelers, seeing the two ferrymen, thought they were brothers. Often, they sat in the evening together by the bank on the log, said nothing and both listened to the water, which was no water to them, but the voice of life, the voice of what exists, of what is eternally taking shape. And it happened from time to time that both, when listening to the river, thought of the same things, of a conversation from the day before yesterday, of one of their travelers, the face and fate of whom had occupied their thoughts, of death, of their childhood, and that they both in the same moment, when the river had been saying something good to them, looked at each other, both thinking precisely the same thing, both delighted about the same answer to the same question.”

“A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.”

“Good thoughts and actions can never produce bad results; bad thoughts and actions can never produce good results … We understand this law in the natural world, and work with it; but few understand it in the mental and moral world—although its operation there is just as simple and undeviating— and they, therefore, do not cooperate with it.”

“As the physically weak man can make himself strong by careful and patient training, so the man of weak thoughts can make them strong by exercising himself in right thinking.”

“I am nothing special; of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I’ve led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I’ve loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough.”

“Something amazing happens when we surrender and just love. We melt into another world, a realm of power already within us. The world changes when we change. The world softens when we soften. The world loves us when we choose to love the world.”

“Love in your mind produces love in your life. This is the meaning of heaven. Fear in your mind produces fear in your life. This is the meaning of hell.”

“Our thoughts make us what we are.”

“Men who live in ages of equality have a great deal of curiosity and very little leisure; their life is so practical, so confused, so excited, so active, that but little time remains to them for thought.”

“Thought is free.”

“Our thoughts make us what we are.”

“Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.”

“Your thoughts become things!”

“If you are feeling good , it is because you are thinking good thoughts .”

“Every thought of yours is a real thing – a force.”

“Your power is in your thoughts, so stay awake. In other words, remember to remember.”

“Remember that your thoughts are the primary cause of everything.”

“Your life right now is a reflection of your past thoughts. That includes all the great things, and all the things you consider not so great. Since you attract to you what you think about most, it is easy to see what your dominant thoughts have been on every subject of your life, because that is what you have experienced. Until now!”

“Nwoye always wondered who Nnadi was and why he should live all by himself, cooking and eating. In the end he decided that Nnadi must live in that land of Ikemefuna’s favorite story where the ant holds his court in the splendor and the sands dance forever.”

“What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything? I’ve thought about it a good deal. But he wasn’t nothin’ compared to what was comin’ down the pike.”

“Waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one’s thoughts.”

“The continuous and unembarrassed interchange of love and thought between God and the soul of the redeemed man is the throbbing heart of New Testament religion.”

“The worst things: To be in bed and sleep not, To want for one who comes not, To try to please and please not.”

“Meditation does not involve trying to change your thinking by thinking some more. It involves watching thought itself.”

“I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.”

“The meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.”

“...I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought - and much less than I would know when he went away.”

“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.”

“No body part can be called “me,” yet somehow the conglomerate of thoughts, memories, physical body and senses is understood to be “me.””

“But, nevertheless, if there is even the slightest recognition, liberation is easy. Should you ask why this is so—it is because once the awesome, terrifying and fearful appearances arise, the awareness does not have the luxury of distraction. The awareness is one-pointedly concentrated.”

“Changing size doesn’t change the brain. If I made you twenty-five tomorrow, Jim, your thoughts would still be boy thoughts, and it’d show! Or if they turned me into a boy of ten this instant, my brain would still be fifty and that boy would act funnier and older and weirder than any boy ever.”

“Our acts can be no wiser than our thoughts.”

“But he fell gradually in love and began to speculate wildly on marriage.”

“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius.”

“Writing taught my father to pay attention; my father in turn taught other people to pay attention and then to write down their thoughts and observations.”

“If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it.”

“[…] let yourself go. You are inclined to get muddled, if I may judge from last night. Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.”

“You need to think in Martian to grok the word ‘grok.‘”

“And if you can’t pick what you do or think about, then maybe you aren’t really real, you know? Maybe I’m just a lie that I’m whispering to myself.”

“Adults think they’re wielding power, but really power is wielding them”

“Thoughts are just a different kind of bacteria, colonizing you. I thought about the gut-brain information axis. Maybe you’re already gone. The prisoners run the jail now. Not a person so much as a swarm. Not a bee, but the hive.”

“Though we tremble before uncertain futures may we meet illness, death and adversity with strength may we dance in the face of our fears.”

“He saw her face each time he closed his eyes. She haunted his thoughts, made him wish to do grand and wonderful things in her name, made him want to be a man who deserved to wear a crown.”

″ It, he thought. She keeps calling the owl it.”

“There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge.”

“Both poverty and riches are the offspring of thought.”

“You have absolute control over but one thing, and that is your thoughts.”

“‘Of course, we knew something was going on,’ Aziraphale said. ‘But one somehow imagines this sort of thing happening in America. They go in for that sort of thing over there.‘”

“‘Sometimes, the wicked will tell us things just to confuse us - to haunt our thoughts long after we’ve faced them.’”

″‘DON’T THINK OF IT AS DYING,’ said Death, ‘JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.‘”

“Little solace comes to those who grieve when thoughts keep drifting as walls keep shifting and this great blue world of ours seems a house of leaves moments before the wind.”

“These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me.”

“It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night.”

“A dull mind ... is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which [an] inference started was purely problematic.”

“You see, I haven’t really thought very much. I was always afraid of what I might think—so it seemed safer not to think at all. But now I know. A thought is like a child inside our body. It has to be born. If it dies inside you, part of you dies too!”

“Brave thoughts, but am I ready to follow through on them?”

“Your subconscious mind does not argue with you. It accepts what your conscious mind decrees. If you say, ‘I can’t afford it,’ your subconscious mind works to make it true. Select a better thought. Decree, ‘I’ll buy it. I accept it in my mind.’ ”

“Every thought is a cause & every condition is an effect. Change your thoughts & you change your destiny.”

“Watch your thoughts. Every thought accepted as true is sent by your brain to your solar plexus – your abdominal brain – and is brought into your world as a reality.”

“I’ve lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they’re more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they’re burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don’t know if that’s just the animal. I don’t know if it’s not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do. It’s so much not enough. It’s so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life.”

“Reason is man’s faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man’s ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. ”

“To forgive is merely to remember only the loving thoughts you gave in the past, and those that were given you.”

“I’ll be a great doctor with excellent bedside skills. I’ll be perfectly happy. But something about Natasha makes me think my life could be extraordinary.”

“I thought that if I did not eat and drink then death would simply follow, but in practice I found that thirst becomes such a frantic obsession that it takes a greater resolve than mine to resist it.”

“The holy angels and the spirits blest, Celestial bands, upon that day serene When first my love went by in heavenly sheen, Came thronging, wondering at the gracious guest. ‘What light is here, in what new beauty drest?’ They said among themselves; ‘for none has seen Within this age arrive so fair a mien From changing earth unto immortal rest.’ And she, contented with her new-found bliss, Ranks with the perfect in that upper sphere, Yet ever and anon looks back on this, To watch for me, as if for me she stayed. So strive my thoughts, lest that high heaven I miss. I hear her call, and must not be delayed.”

“I don’t even feel as if I’m the center of my own world, so how am I supposed to feel as though I’m the center of anyone else’s?”

“Mind is a fertile land and the crop depends on what you sow and how you nurture”

“People think that they can clear up profound matters if they consider them deeply, but they exercise perverse thoughts and come to no good because they do their reflecting with only self-interest at the center.”

“If your thoughts are as tall as the height of your ceiling, you can’t fly above your room.”

“I could not eat or drink a thing for my belly was tied up with fear. My thoughts chased round and round my brainpan.”

“We reached for each other and I thought of how many nights I had lain awake in this room loving him in silence.”

“It’s clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty bumming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together.”

“The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.”

“An argument that happened while you were walking out the door on your way to work is no longer an actual argument, it’s a thought in your mind.”

“Sully strains to say his phrases, sickened by the sounds he raises, strings of thoughts come out in knots, he solves his sentences like mazes. At night, he writes his thoughts instead and sighs as they steadily rush from his head.”

“We need never shout across the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our own soul, closer than our most secret thoughts”

“If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.”

“When people are feeling friendly and placable, they think one sort of thing; when they are feeling angry or hostile, they think either something totally different or the same thing with a different intensity.”

“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.”

“He felt himself trembling without control and he wanted to cry out loudly to stop the runaway horse of his brain. He had to find something! He raged in his mind. I won’t let it go!”

“Therefore, at the beginning of the day let all distraction and empty talk be silenced and let the first thought of the first word belong to him to whom our whole life belongs.”

“The ambition of Caesar and of Napoleon pales before that which could not rest until it had seized the minds of men and controlled even their unborn thoughts.”

“Good. Tonight, after you were gone, I thought a lot. About you and how you’ve been treating me and I thought, “Why do I love you?” And then, I felt everything in me just let go of everything I was holding onto so tightly. And it hit me that I don’t have an intellectual reason. I don’t need one. I trust myself, I trust my feelings. I’m not gonna try to be anything other than who I am anymore and I hope you can accept that.”

“Well, right when you asked me if I had a name I thought, yeah, he’s right, I do need a name. But I wanted to pick a good one, so I read a book called ‘How to Name Your Baby’, and out of a hundred and eighty thousand names that’s the one I liked the best.”

“I have no desire for others to take it on themselves to analyze my thoughts. I am without thoughts.”

“She’d felt ragingly alive in the dream, but now she’s as inert as the eggs cooling on a plate. Ther’s a mirror her in the bedroom, too, but she chooses not to look at it, just in case her hunch is true and she’s invisible.”

“The world of thought, belief and feeling is by definition far more difficult to decipher.”

“Any thought that abandons unity glorifies diversity. And diversity is the home of art.”

“While science has nothing of value to say on the great and aching questions of life, death, love, and meaning, what the religious traditions of mankind have said forms a coherent body of thought..”

“Many people think that happiness comes from having more power or more money.”

“The only thought to liberate the mind is that which leaves it alone, certain of its limits and of its impending end.”

“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought. —Henri Bergson”

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

″‘Keep me in your thoughts,’ he replies. ‘Just because I can’t count to ten doesn’t mean I don’t remember yesterday, or anticipate today.‘”

“[I]t is rather the case that we desire something because we believe it to be good than that we believe a thing to be good because we desire it. It is the thought that starts things off.”

“Nothing can harm you as much as your own thoughts unguarded.”

“Nice to meet you, what’re your thoughts on Apple products?”

“It is a simple law of human psychology that your thoughts will tend to revolve around what you value most.”

“Thought and Memory, my ravens, fly every day the whole world over. Each day I fear that Thought might not return, but I fear more for Memory.”

“Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sitting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come.”

“Her pale blue eyes shuttled around, right and left, to see if Anthony was in sight. Not that it would make any difference if he was or wasn’t- he didn’t have to be near you to know what you were thinking. usually, though, unless he had his attention on somebody, he would be occupied with thoughts of his own. But some things attracted his attention--you could never be sure just what. ‘This weather’s just fine,’ Mom said. Lollop.”

“We all have human feelings, emotions, and thoughts. If we don’t spend time with the Lord, we become dominated by them. But when we spend time with God, our unforgiveness, doubt, lust, hate, anxiety, and sadness becomes forgiveness, faith, purity, love, peace, and joy. ”

“With a walk into his closet, his thoughts took him down a lonesome desert road, far, far away in old Mexico....”

“All his thoughts, all his dreams were centered on the miraculous, endless possibilities opened up by a real, live, miniature Indian of his very own. It would be too terrible if the whole thing turned out to be some sort of mistake.”

“I thought how you could never tell just by looking at them what they were thinking or what was happening in their lives.”

“He thought: How difficult it is to explain yourself to yourself. Sometimes there only is, and no knowing.”

“Is it better to go with the flow or let the flow go?”

“Then Leonardo made a very bid decision.”

“It is better to go with the flow or let the flow go?”

“I have a friend, he thought—I have a friend now. A hungry friend, but a good one. I have a friend named fire.”

“Madlenka thinks this must be the best day of her life.”

“Perhaps death is nothing but a calm and eternal dream.”

“She has to do a lot of thinking about accident victims, because they have acquired brain injuries... So her thinking quota is just about used up by the time she gets home and she can’t be thinking thoughtful thoughts about me and Ricci, and Caramella with a sprained ankle.”

“His thoughts began to race like mad. He was scared and worried. Being helpless, he felt hopeless. He imagined all the possibilities, and eventually he realized that his only chance of becoming himself again was for someone to find the red pebble and to wish that the rock next to it would be a donkey.”

“Mrs. Mouseling shook her head and said, ‘I just don’t know what to do about Angelina.’ Mr. Mouseling thought awhile and then he said, ‘I think I may have an idea.’ ”

“That is very high, thought Little Nutbrown Hare. I wish I had arms like that.”

“That was Homer’s genius. He combined action with thought, and he planned ahead. He sensed, I think, that inaction was our enemy.”

“As sleep crept up on me I turned my mind to my evening ritual […] a movie that I ran in my head every night. In the movie I watched my parents going about their normal lives. […] I didn’t know if I was making myself feel bad by trying to make myself feel good, thinking about my parents, but it was my way of keeping them alive and in my thoughts.”

“Once again, from far away she thought she heard her mother calling. But she knew it couldn’t be...could it?”

“Then she thought she’d found the perfect place...and it was! But not everyone thought so...”

“From far away she thought she heard her mother calling...but it wasn’t her.”

“All he thought about, dreamed about, was the star.”

“he rushed out of the church and into the town to put his idea into practice. And what an awful place the town was, much worse than he had imagined. He almost gave up his idea, but then he thought, ‘If it’s always as nasty as this, everybody is bound to agree to my plan’. So he hurried on...”

“If you spend your time hoping that it doesn’t rain tomorrow, you are wasting your time. Your thoughts don’t change the rain.”

“This world is unfolding and really has very little to do with you or your thoughts. It was here long before you came, and it will be here long after you leave.”

Treehorn sighed, ‘I don’t think I’ll tell anyone,’ he thought to himself, ‘If I don’t say anything, they won’t notice.’ “

“Amos, a mouse, lived by the ocean. He loved the ocean. He loved the smell of sea air. He loved to hear the surf sounds- the bursting breakers, the backwashes with rolling pebbles. He thought a lot about the ocean, and he wondered about the faraway places on the other side of the water.”

“Sitting in his armchair in his small house at the other side of the wood, he laughed and laughed every time he thought about all the people he had tickled. So, if you are in any way ticklish, beware of Mr Tickle and those extraordinary long arms of his. Just think. Perhaps, he’s somewhere about at this very moment while you’re reading this book.”

“Doctor De Soto set the gold tooth in its socket and hooked it up to the teeth on both sides. The fox caressed the new tooth with his tongue. ‘My, it feels good,’ he thought. ‘I really shouldn’t eat them. On the other hand, how can I resist?’ “

“I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.”

“ ‘Perhaps a nice dark hole would be good,’ thought Kipper. ‘The rabbits seem to like them.’

“It was raining in the garden. Mog thought, ‘Perhaps the sun is shining in the street’. When the milkman came she ran out. The milkman shut the door. The sun was not shining in the street after all. It was raining. “

“She was very sad. The garden was dark. The house was dark too. Mog sat in the dark and thought dark thoughts. She thought, ‘Nobody likes me. They’ve all gone to bed. There’s no one to let me in. And they haven’t even given me my supper’. “

“The things I carry are my thoughts. That’s it. They are the only weight. My thoughts determine whether I am free and light or burdened.”

“Remember that your dominating thoughts attract, through a definite law of nature, by the shortest and most convenient route, their physical counterpart. Be careful what your thoughts dwell upon.”

“The wound seeped for a long time before it began to reknit itself. I sat watching it, and as I watched I found a new thought in myself. I am embarrassed to tell it, so rudimentary it seems, like an infant’s discovery that her hand is her own. But that is what I was then, an infant. The thought was this: that all my life had been murk and depths, but I was not a part of that dark water. I was a creature within it.”

“The magazine... is crammed full of food, clothing, cosmetics, furniture, and the physical bodies of young women, but where is the world of thought and ideas, the life of the mind and spirit?”

“Nature will not tolerate idleness or vacuums of any sort. All space must be and is filled with something . . . When the individual does not use the brain for the expression of positive, creative thoughts, nature fills the vacuum by forcing the brain to act upon negative thoughts.”

“The past is over and done. We cannot change that now. Yet we can change our thoughts about the past. How foolish for us to PUNISH OURSELVES in the present moment because someone hurt us in the long-ago past.”

“The only thing we are ever dealing with is a thought, and a thought can be changed. No matter what the problem is, our experiences are just outer effects of inner thoughts.”

“The monsters don’t live in my closet or under my bed. They are a collection of thoughts inside my head.”

“All the events you have experienced in your lifetime up to this moment have been created by the thoughts and beliefs you have held in the past.”

“We are each responsible for all our experiences. Every thought we think is creating our future.”

“He knew the principle of the room exactly. You sent out your thoughts. Whatever you thought would appear.”

“The Aristotelian tradition also held that one could work out all the laws that govern the universe by pure thought: it was not necessary to check by observation. So no one until Galileo bothered to see whether bodies of different weight did in fact fall at different speeds.”

“Thomas was a cheeky little engine, too. He thought no engine worked as hard as he did. So he used to play tricks on them. He liked best of all to come quietly beside a big engine dozing on the siding and make him jump.”

“Day by day the prince grew fonder and fonder of her; but he loved her as he would have loved a good child, and had no thought of making her his queen.”

“I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true.”

“And yet isn’t it strange, I though that day. Mamma never comes with me. Doesn’t she ever think it might be dangerous? Hasn’t she seen how wild and isolated is out there? No, that was the point. She’d never seen it. All of sudden two thoughts were colliding in my head.”

″ ‘You know,’ she says to me, kind of quiet. ‘You are not just a giraffe. You’re Geraldine. You dance like crazy. You pretend so well, one time I thought you were the Queen of England.’ ”

“Privately I thought, Well, and what if we gave in to our troubles at every step! We would be pitiable creatures indeed to be so weak, for is not a man’s spirit given to him to rise above his misfortunes?”

“This it was that gave me a thought. No apology could blot out what I had said; it was needless to think of one, none could cover the offense; but where an apology was vain, a mere cry for help might bring Alan back to my side. I put my pride away from me. ‘Alan!’ I said; ‘if ye cannae help me, I must just die here.’ ”

“If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door, Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees, Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more, ‘He was one who had an eye for such mysteries’?”

“I thought cats and mice were enemies.”

“In medieval Europe the Church dictated what you should believe, but at least it allowed you to retain the same beliefs from birth to death. It didn’t tell you to believe one thing on Monday and another on Tuesday. ....In a sense his thoughts are circumscribed, but he passes his whole life within the same framework of thought. His emotions aren’t tampered with. Now, with totalitarianism exactly the opposite is true. The peculiarity of the totalitarian state is that though it controls thought, it doesn’t fix it. It sets up unquestionable dogmas, and it alters them from day to day. It needs the dogmas, because it needs absolute obedience from its subjects, but it can’t avoid the changes, which are dictated by the needs of power politics. It declares itself infallible, and at the same time it attacks the very concept of objective truth.”

“When a man is very good and knows a great deal, he is elected president. They have torch-light processions and bands, and everyone makes speeches. I used to think I might perhaps be a president, but I never thought about being an earl. I didn’t know anything about being an earl.”

“I thought I was bigger. Tough. But I’m just a bit of nothing.”

“With a great effort of will he shed Ludwig from his mind and turned to his friends.”

“Everything was delicious- outside and inside him. Nothing to dread anymore- no doors closed in his mind against thoughts and fears that made him sicken and tremble- it was all good, the sun, the water, Flicka, his father- ”

“But my sister hadn’t meant to be naughty. She thought she had given the book-little-boy her own supper, and you know she was quite a greedy child, so it was a kind thing to do really.”

“He continued to think, not the lazy meandering thoughts of one about to fall asleep, but exact and definite thoughts.”

“Lovely thoughts came flying to meet me like birds. They weren’t my thoughts. I couldn’t think anything half so exquisite. They came from somewhere.”

“Mrs Koala had not thought of a name for her baby. Now, she thought it quite time he was christened, so one day she talked the matter over with his father. ‘Shall we call him ‘Walter’ or ‘Bluegum?’ she inquired. ‘No,’ grunted Mr Koala. ‘Let’s call hum ‘Blinky Bill.’ So Blinky Bill he became from that moment.”

″...it’s like saying, ‘Don’t think about cookies,’ and now you’re thinking about cookies.”

“As surely and quickly as you saw that the young woman’s hair is dark, you knew she is angry. Furthermore, what you saw extended into the future. You sensed that this woman is about to say some very unkind words, probably in a loud and strident voice.”

“Understand at last that you have something in you more powerful and divine than what causes the bodily passions and pulls you like a mere puppet. What thoughts now occupy my mind? Is it not fear, suspicion, desire, or something like that?”

“Your principles can’t be extinguished unless you snuff out the thoughts that feed them, for it’s continually in your power to reignite new ones...It’s possible to start living again! See things anew as you once did--that is how to restart life!”

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”

“Only rocks considered sitting still a virtue. Demons take me before I called it one of mine.”

“I think of her everywhere. She is my everywhere, in every moment, and also she’s in no one moment. She misses every single one of my moments and I’m not sure who that is harder for: me surviving here without her, or her without me, existing wherever she is.”

“Food feeds the belly, thoughts feed the mind, but love is what feeds the heart.”

“If fate is a bunch of strings, then I’ll carry scissors. My choices are my own. I’ll make them as I please.”

“It’s a perfect description. I never got to fall out of love. I just had to move on.”

“He would lose himself in his favorite books and pamphlets, reading them avidly.”

“Relief and anguish pulse heavily in my blood. I’ve wanted to see him every day. But also, I never wanted to see him again.”

“Rossamund smiled woozily at the thought. Now he wanted to sleep but his aching face would not let him.”

“Do you wonder about what the new stuff would actually be like?”

’Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too--all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides--made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!

The Old Grey Donkey, Eeyore, stood by himself in a thistly corner of the forest, his front feet well apart, his head on one side, and thought about things. Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, “Why?” and sometimes he thought, “Wherefore?” and sometimes he thought, “Inasmuch as which?“—and sometimes he didn’t quite know what he was thinking about.

You know as well as I do, that for every thought she spends on Linton she spends a thousand on me!

I live on the same earth as the majority, I wear the same kind of shoes and sleep in the same kind of bed; but I do not think the same kind of thoughts, and I do not wish to pay for such thinkers as the majority selects.

“Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician.”

“Besides, Dorian, don’t deceive yourself. Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.”

“It would have been something if you’d cared enough to think of it, even if you didn’t do it.”