Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jimmy Carter

Thoughtful criticism and close scrutiny of all government officials by the press and the public are an important part of our democratic society.

Johan Huizinga

Most thoughtful Americans of today seem to have forgotten how strongly their own and immediate predecessors, Emerson, Hawthorne and Whitman, were still preoccupied with the essence behind things.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account; with all its pros and cons, such knowing never gets anywhere, and it knows not why.... The analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, was, in fact, nothing else than ridding it of the form in which it had become familiar.

Malcolm Gladwell

There's no idea that can't be explained to a thoughtful 14-year-old. If the thoughtful 14-year-old doesn't get it, it is your fault, not the 14-year-old's.

Gail Carriger

Here, I stole it for you. Why don’t you tell me what it’s for.” “Aw, Sophronia, how thoughtful. You brought me a present!

Ellen Glasgow

Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.

Ellen DeGeneres

I'm just saying we can all work on our manners. We can say please and thank you. We can be punctual. We can just be nicer to one another. It's something we have in our power to do. It reminds me of that Margaret Mead quote: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Deeply earnest and thoughtful people stand on shaky footing with the public.

Edgar Allan Poe

It is with literature as with law or empire - an established name is an estate in tenure, or a throne in possession.

Edgar Allan Poe

Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man.

Edgar Allan Poe

A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul.

Edgar Allan Poe

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

Edgar Allan Poe

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.

Edgar Allan Poe

To observe attentively is to remember distinctly.

Gertrude Stein

Sinclair Lewis is the perfect example of the false sense of time of the newspaper world.... [ellipsis in source] He was always dominated by an artificial time when he wrote Main Street.... He did not create actual human beings at any time. That is what makes it newspaper. Sinclair Lewis is the typical newspaperman and everything he says is newspaper. The difference between a thinker and a newspaperman is that a thinker enters right into things, a newspaperman is superficial.

Gretchen Rubin

Feelings follow actions. If I'm feeling low, I deliberately act cheery, and I find myself actually feeling happier. If I'm feeling angry at someone, I do something thoughtful for her and my feelings toward her soften. This strategy is uncannily effective.

Gordon B. Hinckley

If we live by the principles of the gospel, we must be good people, for we will be generous and kind, thoughtful and tolerant, helpful and outreaching to those in distress. We can either subdue the divine nature and hide it so that it finds no expression in our lives, or we can bring it to the front and let it shine through all that we do.

Henry David Thoreau

We belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.

Henry David Thoreau

The thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of the marketplace.

Jill Soloway

My experience as a Jewish American has often been as a spectator of one-sided conversations, or more like monologues, about Israel, Jewish History, Jewish identity, etc. Although there are profound divisions amongst Jews on all of these topics there are not many opportunities for deep and thoughtful dialogue about them.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.

Harold Russell

Yet compared with the serious things of life, fishing is after all rather trivial. The thoughtful angler must frankly confess this.

George Will

Obama entered the presidency trailing clouds of intellectual self-regard. His carefully cultivated persona was of a uniquely thoughtful, judicious, deliberative, evidence-driven man comfortable with complexity. The protracted consideration of Keystone supposedly displayed these virtues. Now, however, it is clear that his mind has always been as closed as an unshucked oyster.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee

Give back in some way. Always be thoughtful of others.

Christopher Hitchens

The polls undoubtedly help to decide what people think, but their most important long-term influence may be on how people think. The interrogative process is very distinctly weighted against the asking of an intelligent question or the recording of a thoughtful answer.

Chris Pratt

You get to a point where you have to start planning, when you cross that line where you have enough value to get someone's movie made if you attach yourself to it, you have to be very thoughtful and have to plan. When you're starting out, you're willing to do anything.

Chris Hughes

I think there's an important difference between the newspaper and a magazine. I view the role of the magazine as providing the deeper reporting and the thoughtful analysis to help you make sense of why that news is important.

Frank Spotnitz

The actors in Britain are incredible, and I didn't appreciate that until I got there. They interpret your words and you realize how deliberate and thoughtful they are. There are great American actors, too, don't get me wrong, but the technique that British actors have is something really special.

Hosea Ballou

The heavens and the earth, the woods and the wayside, teem with instruction and knowledge to the curious and thoughtful.

Hannah Arendt

... the will always wills to do something and thus implicitly holds in contempt sheer thinking, whose whole activity depends on "doing nothing.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The thought is merely a sign, as the word is merely a sign for the thought.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Those with very loud voices in their throats are nearly incapable of thinking subtle thoughts.

Friedrich Nietzsche

To one who is accustomed to thinking a lot, every new thought that he hears or reads about immediately appears as a link in a chain.