Top 100 Human Thought Quotes
#1. A beautiful book is a victory won in all the battlefields of human thought.
Honore De Balzac
#2. The immense distance between God and humanity is the indispensable backdrop to a Christian idea of revelation. To reduce God to the level of human thought and human imagination, so that we can comprehend God, is to lose a sense of the very thing that distinguishes God as God.
A.J. Conyers
#3. The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.
Richard Powers
#4. If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment ...
Edgar Allan Poe
#5. In the world of human thought generally, and in physical science particularly, the most important and fruitful concepts are those to which it is impossible to attach a well-defined meaning.
Hans Kramers
#6. We suffer from the delusion that the entire universe is held in order by the categories of human thought, fearing that if we do not hold to them with the utmost tenacity, everything will vanish into chaos. We
Alan W. Watts
#7. The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought.
Stephen Jay Gould
#8. Furthermore, as long as the world shall last, there will always be people who, either for the sake of peace or from an unquiet conscience, will build up sublime lies for their neighbours. And these people have always been and will always be the masters of human thought.
Lev Shestov
#9. The idea that we have the right to inflict suffering and death on other sentient beings for the trivial reasons of palate pleasure and fashion is, without doubt, one of the most arrogant and morally repugnant notions in the history of human thought.
Gary L. Francione
#10. Every wheatfield of human thought after a while becomes filled with cockle; then the husbandmen destroy the grain with the cockle and plant anew.
Austin O'Malley
#11. Every government on earth is the personification of violence and force, and yet the doctine of non-resistance is as old as human thought - even more than this, the instinct is as old as life upon the earth.
Clarence Darrow
#12. Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another
physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.
Toni Morrison
#13. How DARE you and the rest of your barbarians set fire to my library? Play conqueror all you want, Mighty Caesar! Rape, murder, pillage thousands, even millions of human beings! But neither you nor any other barbarian has the right to destroy one human thought!
William Shakespeare
#14. The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.
Havelock Ellis
#15. Darwin has done more to change human thought than all the priests who have existed.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#16. We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.
Vladimir Nabokov
#17. If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.
Albert Camus
#18. The existence of symmetry laws is in full accordance with our daily experience. The simplest of these symmetries, the isotropy and homogeneity of space, are concepts that date back to the early history of human thought.
Chen-Ning Yang
#19. Disease is a manifestation of human thought because it is ideas, worldviews, and beliefs that create the conditions in which a society can be riddled with disease, strife, and poverty, or can continue in health and harmony.
F. David Peat
#20. ...sitting in David's armchair, contemplating the many books that lined his shelves, a thought occured to me. It was a very human thought; it surprised me, i checked myself for viruses.
Liz Moore
#21. The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow (in the Book of Genesis days are equal to years, ages). But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#22. As soon as the printing press started flooding Europe with books, people were complaining that there were too many books and that it was going to change philosophy and the course of human thought in ways that wouldn't necessarily be good.
James Gleick
#23. Far from being the crown of human thought and religion as its supporters have claimed for several bloody millennia, [monotheism] is in fact a monstrous step backwards
a step that has been responsible for more human misery than any other idea in known history.
Isaac Bonewits
#24. When to the Permanent is sacrificed the Mutable, the prize is thine: the drop returneth whence it came. The Open Path leads to the changeless change - Non-Being, the glorious state of Absoluteness, the Bliss past human thought.
Alexander Pope
#25. Human thought has no limit. At its risk and peril, it analyzes and dissects its own fascination. We could almost say that, by a sort of splendid reaction, it fascinates nature; the mysterious world surrounding us returns what it receives; it is likely that contemplators are contemplated.
Victor Hugo
#26. All human thought, including scientific thought, rests on premises which cannot be validated by human reason and which came from historical epoch to historical epoch.
Leo Strauss
#27. Excessive symmetry is either unnatural and conceals some human thought behind it, or else supernatural and conceals some mystery.
Luis Fernando Verissimo
#28. Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.
Victor Hugo
#29. Science attempts to find logic and simplicity in nature. Mathematics attempts to establish order and simplicity in human thought.
Edward Teller
#30. Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.
James Gleick
#32. This is what mankind has always wanted... that the environment should respond to human thought. That is the core of magic and the oldest dream of mankind, and, here on me, it is fact.
Gene Wolfe
#33. Almost all the progress ever made in human thought has been made by the Doubting Thomas's, the questioners, the challengers, the show-me crowd.
Dale Carnegie
#34. What a frightful weapon is human thought! It is our defense and our safeguard, the most precious gift that God has made us. It is ours and it obeys us; we may launch it forth into space, but, once outside of our feeble brains, it is gone; we can no longer control it.
Alfred De Musset
#35. Conversationis like the table of contents of a dull book ... All the greatest subjects of human thought are proudly displayedin it. Listen to it for three minutes, and you ask yourself which is more striking, the emphasis of the speaker or his shocking ignorance.
Stendhal
#36. I looked around, and I don't know why, but I assure you that never, never before, did this land, this river, this jungle, the very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness.
Joseph Conrad
#37. In a future time when most human thought has been accelerated by artificial intelligence and external memory can be shared on a universal matrix... GITS 2
Masaki Yamada
#38. Today, when you combine the web with the iPad, you have the most advanced medium for human thought and communication ever created.
Mike McCue
#39. Everything has been said, and we are more than seven thousand years of human thought too late.
Jean De La Bruyere
#40. The eternal sound of the sea on every side has a tendency to wear away the edge of human thought and perception ...
Celia Thaxter
#41. For science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary. Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought and action: it cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships between facts.
Albert Einstein
#42. All human thought, all science, all religion, is the holding of a candle to the night of the universe.
Clark Ashton Smith
#43. If a machine can convincingly imitate humanity - can persuade a human being of its kinship - then what makes it inhuman? What, after all, is human thought but a series of electrical impulses?
Liz Moore
#44. The power of human thought grows exponentially with the number of minds that share that thought.
Dan Brown
#45. The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
H.L. Mencken
#46. In proportion as architecture degenerated, printing throve and flourished. The capital of forces which human thought had expended in building, it henceforth expended in books.
Victor Hugo
#47. We have merely scratched the surface of the store of knowledge which will come to us. I believe that we are now, a-tremble on the verge of vast discoveries - discoveries so wondrously important they will upset the present trend of human thought and start it along completely new lines .
Thomas A. Edison
#48. The God who is human in his divinity is the precise opposite of an essence which in ill-willed fashion closes itself to all human thought and knowledge... As love, rather, God is thinkable, without a distinction capable of made between essence and existence. Love is essentially existing lovingly.
Eberhard Jungel
#49. The belief in creation as the background of empiricomathematical [sic] science-that seems strange. Yet the ways of thought, human thought, in its search for truth are, indeed, very strange.
Alexandre Koyre
#50. Around the mighty master came
The marvels which his pencil wrought,
Those miracles of power whose fame
Is wide as human thought.
John Greenleaf Whittier
#51. I'm saying that Nexus may defy human understanding because it is not the product of normal human thought,"Holtzman said. "It is the product of posthuman thought.
Ramez Naam
#52. If it is true that the violin is the most perfect of musical instruments, then Greek is the violin of human thought.
Helen Keller
#53. Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.
("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#54. A book is so soon made, costs so little, and may go so far! Why should we surprised that all human thought flows that way?
Victor Hugo
#55. External motion we call action; internal motion is human thought.
Swami Vivekananda
#57. I'd open the door in the morning and the slightly sweet smell of second hand books would greet me. For years I wondered just what that smell was. In the end I decided it was the smell of human thought embedded in paper.
Heather Rose
#58. There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things.
Murray Bookchin
#59. If we use the past only to creature heroes for present purposes, we will never understand the richness of human thought or the plurality of ways of knowing.
Stephen Jay Gould
#60. Two genuinely human thoughts are always different, just as two men's palms are."
"What's a genuinely human thought?"
"One that's usually not told to anyone.
Mesa Selimovic
#61. It is not the world that is absurd, nor human thought: the absurd arises when the human need to understand meets the unreasonableness of the world, when 'my appetite for the absolute and for unity' meets 'the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle.'
Albert Camus
#62. Philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor.
Martin Heidegger
#63. All of the philosophers I studied were white (with a few Eastern exceptions), and, for that matter, they were all male. Africa, the cradle of civilization, seemed to have no footing in the highest form of human thought.
Walter Mosley
#64. Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.
Vladimir Nabokov
#65. We teach mental literacy and radiant thinking; a revolution in human thought.
Tony Buzan
#66. It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought! Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide themselves.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#67. Takes us the farther distance from the Old World to something new and revolutionary in human thought. That moral center, however, is hard to find with modern eyes. Locating it requires
Niccolo Machiavelli
#68. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought
G.K. Chesterton
#69. Someone dehumanises you by violating your child and every human thought you had for them is broken, undermined, then gone.
Abigail Tarttelin
#70. The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought.
H.G.Wells
#71. And this grey spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge, like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
Richard Flanagan
#72. Recover the source of all strength in yourself, and all else will be added to you ... political freedom, the mastery of human thought, the hegemony of the world.
Sri Aurobindo
#73. ...human thought is by no means as private as it seems, and all that you need to read somebody else's mind is the willingness to read your own.
William Maxwell
#74. Life teaches us that human thought almost never walks hand in hand with logic, and it is usually counterproductive to raise the point.
Jeff Lindsay
#75. [Christ] will come again. But we must look to Scripture, not human thought, for our guide to preparing.
David Jeremiah
#76. Ideas came with explosive immediacy, like an instant birth. Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum; it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other.
Eugene Field
#77. The emergence of a new term to describe a certain phenomenon, of a new adjective to designate a certain quality, is always of interest, both linguistically and from the point of view of the history of human thought.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#78. Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human thought.
Annie Besant
#79. We wish our names eternally to live; Wild dream! which ne'er had haunted human thought, Had not our natures been eternal too.
Edward Young
#80. Every human thought, word, or deed is based on fear or love. Fear is the energy which contracts, closes down, draws in, hides, hoards, harms. Love is the energy which expands, opens up, sends out, reveals, shares, heals. You have free choice about which of these to select.
Neale Donald Walsch
#81. Human thought by its nature is capable of giving, and does give, absolute truth, which is compounded of a sum-total of relative truths.
Vladimir Lenin
#82. By wit we search divine aspect above,
By wit we learn what secrets science yields,
By wit we speak, by wit the mind is rul'd,
By wit we govern all our actions;
Wit is the loadstar of each human thought,
Wit is the tool by which all things are wrought.
Robert Greene
#83. The Nobel prizes memorialize Alfred Nobel's faith in the contribution that human thought, directed to science and art, can make to human welfare.
Herbert A. Simon
#84. The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought.
Gustave Le Bon
#85. The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark
now glittering
now reflecting gloom
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#86. Sacred interpreter of human thought,
How few respect or use thee as they ought!
But all shall give account of every wrong,
Who dare dishonor or defile the tongue;
Who prostitute it in the cause of vice,
Or sell their glory at a market-price!
William Cowper
#87. Once a suggestion has entered the general atmosphere of human thought, it is very difficult to neutralise it.
Patricia Wentworth
#88. We're here to make a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why even be here? We're creating a completely new consciousness, like an artist or a poet. That's how you have to think of this. We're rewriting the history of human thought with what we're doing.
Steve Jobs
#89. This has suggested to some that the very structure of human thought is oppositional-that is to say, rational and associative, rather than linear and categorical.
Marcel Danesi
#90. Do not view mountains from the scale of human thought
Dogen
#91. What deadens us most to God's presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continually engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought.
Frederick Buechner
#92. He felt the logic of grammar, and he thought he perceived how it spread out from itself, permeating the language and supporting human thought.
John Edward Williams
#93. Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are ultimately answered.
Daniel Webster
#94. How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?
Albert Einstein
#95. The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion.
Joseph Conrad
#96. Julian Jaynes's theories for the nature of self-awareness, introspection, and consciousness have replaced the assumption of their almost ethereal uniqueness with explanations that could initiate the next change in paradigm for human thought.
Michael Persinger
#97. The work of human thought should withstand the test of brutal, naked reality. If it cannot, it is worthless. Probably only those things are worthwhile which can preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with instant death.
Czeslaw Milosz
#98. God's revelation does not need the light of human genius, the polish and strength of human culture, the brilliancy of human thought, the force of human brains to adorn or enforce it; but it does demand the simplicity, the docility, humility, and faith of a child's heart.
E. M. Bounds
#99. What was a book? Not just ink and fiber and stitchery: a series of processes. To a wizard, it was not a static object
but a human thought caught and bound, made concrete through sacred technology. Magic, then, and a deep form of it.
Elizabeth Bear
#100. There is no sphere of human thought in which it is easier to show superficial cleverness and the appearance of superior wisdom than in discussing questions of currency and exchange
Winston Churchill
