Thought - Quotes
I do not fear death. I fear suffering. And I fear old age, though less so now that I am witnessing the tranquil and pleasant old age of my father. I am afraid of frailty, and of the absence of love. But death does not alarm me. It did not scare me when I was young, and I thought at the time that this was because it was such a remote prospect. But now, at sixty, the fear has yet to arrive. I love life, but life is also struggle, suffering, pain. I think of death as akin to a well-earned rest.
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.
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.
There are so many things to be thought over and decided when you`re beginning to grow up. It keeps me busy all the time thinking them over and deciding what is right. It`s a serious thing to grow up, isn`t it [...]?
I didn`t want to be the lead guy. That`s too much work. But I thought that it might be fun to be the lead guy`s friend. I`d have days off and still get a paycheck every week.
What did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think. I`ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.
You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don`t see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it.
We cannot define anything precisely! If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers, who sit opposite each other, one saying to the other "You don't know what you are talking about!" The second one says "What do you mean by know? What do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you?", and so on.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
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.
You know, I never thought love was real. I didn`t. And now I think life isn`t real without it.
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.