Quotes to inspire and reflect

By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought 1 comprehend the world.

Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.

Most thinkers write badly, because they communicate not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of them.

Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.

The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have.

All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.

To meditate is to labour; to think is to act.

You may derive thoughts from others; your way ol thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own.

The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame.

Those that think must govern those that toil.

All thought is a feat of association: having what’s in front of you bring up something in your mind that you almost didn’t know you knew.

What is the hardest task in the world? To think.

If a man sits down to think, he is immediately asked if he has the headache.

Thought makes every thing fit for use.

In itself, a thought, / A slumbering thought, is capable of years, / And curdles a long life into one hour.

What was once thought can never be unthought.

The utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

One thought fills immensity.

Let us work without theorizing ... tis the only way to make life, endurable.

It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.

It is only theory that makes men completely incautious.

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go beyond.

To be sure, theory is useful. But without warmth of heart and without love it bruises the very ones it claims to save.

The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearances of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life.

In theory, there is nothing to hinder our following what we are taught, but in life there are many things to draw us aside.

Theology is an attempt to explain a subject by men who do not understand it. The intent is not to tell the truth but to satisfy the questioner.

Theological religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances; it is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.

The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being.

Hypotheses are only the pieces of scaffolding which are erected round a building during the course of construction, and which are taken away as soon as the edifice is completed.

The cure for false theology is motherwit. Forget your books and traditions, and obey your moral perceptions at this hour.

First, I hate all theological controversy: it is wearing to the temper, and is I believe (at all events when viva voce) worse than useless.

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself.

We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.

On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past and the future, w'hich is the essential character of conscious being.

A dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and countershocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment.

A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.

The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

Surely no other American institution is so bound around and tightened up by rules, strictures, adages, and superstitions as the Broadway theatre.

1 see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form.

The theater, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.

Not to go to the theatre is like making one’s toilet without a mirror.

The drama is make-believe. It does not deal with truth but with effect.

The inclination to digress is human. But the dramatist must avoid it even more strenuously than the saint must avoid sin, for while sin may be venial, digression is mortal.

The stage but echoes back the public voice. / The drama’s laws the drama’s patrons give, / For we that live to please, must please to live.

We do not go [to the theatre], like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm our experience of it.

I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.

A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can’t be much good.