Thought - Quotes
Death is nothing. I`m not afraid of nothing. But time passing is something different. I`m terrified of time passing. I tremble at the thought of my little girl growing up. I can`t face my son growing stronger than me and helping me up the stairs. I quake at the prospect of looking at my adult children`s faces with eyesight worse than I have now.
Just as one wouldn`t draw a lasting conclusion about oneself on the basis of a brief experience of indigestion, one needn`t do so on the basis of how one has thought or behaved for vast stretches of time in the past. A creative change of inputs to the system - learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attention - may radically transform one`s life.
Experience teaches, [...] that there is no such thing as a thought experiment so clearly presented that no philosopher can misinterpret it.
Life is pain! I wake up every morning in pain! Work is pain! You know how many times I just wanted to give up? How many times I`ve thought about ending it?
We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.
When I turned two I was really anxious, because I'd doubled my age in a year. I thought, if this keeps up, by the time I'm six I'll be ninety.
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
Many of the greatest things man has achieved are not the result of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately co-ordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand.
People talk about books that write themselves, and it`s a lie. Books don`t write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you`d believe.
The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.
When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
I am sure that I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round [...] as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely.
Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.