When I feel well and in a good humour, or when I am taking a drive or walking after a good meal, or in the night when I cannot sleep, thoughts crowd into my mind as easily as you could wish.
—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
—Henry David Thoreau
A certain awkwardness usually marks our use of borrowed thoughts. They are too conspicuous, not being well placed.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Life is full of troubles and vexations, that one must either rise above it by means of corrected thoughts, or leave it.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
So the problem is not so much to see what nobody has yet seen, as to think what nobody has yet thought concerning that which everybody sees.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up; I forget them almost immediately.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.
—Marcus Aurelius
This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.
—Søren Kierkegaard
How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.
—Søren Kierkegaard
The manner in which Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener quoted; because it is entirely composed of thoughts born from the common talk of life.
—Blaise Pascal
Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings — always darker, emptier and simpler.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
—Søren Kierkegaard
I undertook to conquer myself rather than fortune, and to alter my desires rather than change the order of the world, and to accustom myself to believe that nothing is entirely in our power except our own thoughts.
The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
When people marvel at Shakespeare or Beethoven, they’re really marveling at their own thoughts and dreams, which the artist has evoked.
—Leo Tolstoy
I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die.
—Leonardo Da Vinci
How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?
—Plato
I thought to myself: I am wiser than this man; neither of us probably knows anything that is really good, but he thinks he has knowledge, when he has not, while I, having no knowledge, do not think I have.
—Plato
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their unison can knowledge arise.
—Immanuel Kant
Those who reason most powerfully and are the most successful at ordering their thoughts so as to make them clear and intelligible will always be best able to persuade others of what they say, even if they speak in the thickest of dialects.
—René Descartes
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
—Immanuel Kant
The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts.
—René Descartes
Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
—Immanuel Kant
The general who advances without coveting fame and retreats without fearing disgrace, whose only thought is to protect his country and do good service for his sovereign, is the jewel of the kingdom.
—Sun Tzu
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
—Aristotle
No thought is born in me that does not bear the image of death.
—Michelangelo
Let God be in all your thoughts, and ye will be men indeed. Let him be your God and your All,—the desire of your eyes, the joy of your heart, and your portion for ever.
—John Wesley