Original Thought Quotes

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. ~ H.L. Mencken

There is a distinction between what may be called a problem and what may be considered an exercise. The latter serves to drill a student in some technique or procedure, and requires little if any, original thought ... No exercise, then, can always be done with reasonbable dispatch and with a miniumum of creative thinking. In contrast to an exercise, a problem, if it is a good one for its level, should require though on the part of the student. ~ Howard Whitley Eves

Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. ~ Edward Bernays

A female's body should be looked at and respected as something divine. At least, that was the original thought, but time marches on, and the sanctity of the sacred body is no longer sacred. ~ Lionel Suggs

One Original Thought is worth 1000 Meaningless Quotes. ~ Banksy

If you meet life squarely, you are likely to make mistakes, do things you wish you hadn't, say things you wish you could retract or phrase more felicitously, and, in short, fumble your way along. Those "mature" people whose lives are even without a single sour note or a single mistake, who never fumble, manage only at the cost of original thought and original action. They do without the successes as well as the failures. ~ Alexei Panshin

The majority of business men are not capable of an original thought, simply because they cannot escape the tyranny of reason. ~ David Ogilvy

I had a date with a girl I called 'the parrot.' All she did was repeat everything I said. She never had an original thought of her own. Everything I liked, she liked. Everything I hated, she hated. It was annoying! ~ Justin Chon

I have thought about Happy Days made into a movie. As far as the original cast not being a part of it, wow, I don't know who could be who! I just don't see it going in that direction. I can see the original cast doing the movie very easily though. ~ Erin Moran

No original thought still exists. People are original, each one of them. The same ideas that others had before you are waiting for you to bring them back to life in a new way. The part of who you are that is left behind within these old ideas is what makes them original all over again. ~ Ashly Lorenzana

Scroll through a list of books online, and you will find page after page after page of book covers with shirtless guys and titles that scream BILLIONAIRE ROMANCE! or ALPHA-MALE PARANORMAL WEREWOLF ROMANCE! or something equally ridiculous. All these shitty books look like clones of each other. There's not an original thought in sight. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

The mistaken and unhappy notion that a man is an enduring unity is known to you. It is also known to you that a man consists of a multitude of souls, of numerous selves. The separation of the unity of the personality into these numerous pieces passes for madness. Science has invented the name schizomania for it. Science is in this so far right as no multiplicity maybe dealt with unless there be a series, a certain order and grouping. It is wrong insofar as it holds that one only and binding lifelong order is possible for the multiplicity of subordinate selves. This error of science has many unpleasant consequences, and the single advantage of simplifying the work of the state-appointed pastors and masters and saving them the labors of original thought. In consequence of this error many persons pass for normal, and indeed for highly valuable members of society, who are incurably mad; and many, on the other hand, are looked upon as mad who are geniuses...This is the art of life. You may yourself as an artist develop the game of your life and lend it animation. You may complicate and enrich it as you please. It lies in your hands. Just as madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizomania the beginning of all art and all fantasy. ~ Hermann Hesse

The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation. ~ Thomas A. Edison

Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic. ~ Salman Rushdie

We would have to invent the U.N. if we did not have it, which is not an original thought. ~ Shirley Temple

An original thought would crack your feeble skull like a thunderbolt, you craven vulture. ~ Christopher Moore

Schooling as it presently exists, like science before and religion before that, is necessary to the continuation of our culture and to the spawning of a new species of human, ever more submissive to authority, ever more pliant, prepared, by thirteen years of sitting and receiving, sitting and regurgitating, sitting and waiting for the end, prepared for the rest of their lives to toil, to propagate, to never make waves, and to live each day with never an original thought nor even a shred of hope. ~ Derrick Jensen

Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met. ~ Fran Lebowitz

Do I have an original thought in my head? My bald head. Maybe if I were happier, my hair wouldn't be falling out.
Life is short. I need to make the most of it. Today is the first day of the rest of my life. I'm a walking cliché.
I really need to go to the doctor and have my leg checked. There's something wrong. A bump. The dentist called again. I'm way overdue. If I stop putting things off, I would be happier. All I do is sit on my fat ass. If my ass wasn't fat I would be happier. I wouldn't have to wear these shirts with the tails out all the time. Like that's fooling anyone. Fat ass.
I should start jogging again. Five miles a day. Really do it this time. Maybe rock climbing. I need to turn my life around. What do I need to do? I need to fall in love. I need to have a girlfriend. I need to read more, improve myself. What if I learned Russian or something? Or took up an instrument? I could speak Chinese. I'd be the screenwriter who speaks Chinese and plays the oboe. That would be cool.
I should get my hair cut short. Stop trying to fool myself and everyone else into thinking I have a full head of hair. How pathetic is that?
Just be real. Confident. Isn't that what women are attracted to? Men don't have to be attractive. But that's not true. Especially these days. Almost as much pressure on men as there is on women these days.
Why should I be made to feel I have to apologize for my existence? Maybe it's my brain chemistry. Maybe that's what's wron ~ Charlie Kaufman

I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost. ~ Barbara Tuchman

And then we turn 18 and even though we never had an original thought we have to make the most important decission of our lives. ~ Jay Asher

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

There's one difference between me and them: I know I'm not qualified. In my opinion, Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't qualified to be governor of California. Ronald Reagan wasn't qualified to be governor, let alone president. I was a vice president of the Screen Actors Guild when he was its president. My duties consisted of attending meetings and voting. The only thing I remember is that Ronnie never had an original thought and that we had to tell him what to say. That's no way to run a union, let along a state or a country. ~ James Garner

Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine. ~ Edward L. Bernays

One original thought is worth a thousand mindless quotings. ~ Diogenes Laertius

Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment. ~ Johan Huizinga

Over the years, whenever I've felt that little twinkle in the hairs on the back of my neck., as I encountered an original thought or observation in a fishing book, I've turned the corner of the page down. ~ Arnold Gingrich

To some people original thought is a medical condition that leads to migraines ~ Rassool Jibraeel Snyman

I love hanging out with my friends and family. I really, really, really love articulating original thought. That's probably my core, my biggest buzz. Because then it makes me feel like I know why I was born. Reaching original thought, where I know that I'm perceiving something that only I have seen, and I need to incarnate that. That's it right there. ~ Caroline Myss

I have another letter for you," I say, pulling the slightly creased paper out of my pocket.

"I read the other one last night," he says. "Verified all the quotations, too. Give me another day and I could track down all of the ancient sources from which your mistress drew her rhetorical figures, because - well, imitating six authors in two pages may be a good exercise, but with that many pieces stitched together, it's impossible to hide the seams, let alone express an original thought."

I remember Koré's pale face when she handed me the letter this morning, her ink-stained fingers.

"She's a very stupid person," I say. "But it is neither lordly nor kind to sneer at her efforts."

"You have an odd kind of loyalty."

"You have an odd kind of tact. Or is that beneath the notice of a duke's heir? ~ Rosamund Hodge

Religion disapproves of original thought the way Dracula does sunlight. ~ Pat Condell

Indeed it may be said with some confidence that the average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. There are moments when his cogitations are relatively more respectable than usual, but even at their climaxes they never reach anything properly describable as the level of serious thought. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. That is to say, they never think anything that has not been thought before and by thousands. ~ H.L. Mencken

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and wonder if my life would be different if I had to do it over ... Then a voice comes to me out of the dark that says, boy, there's an original thought! ~ Charles M. Schulz

I would rather be the author of one original thought than conqueror of a hundred battles. Yet moral excellence is so much superior to intellectual, that I ought to esteem one virtue more valuable than a hundred original thoughts. ~ William Benton Clulow

Song-Mi Lee, ... her life wholly dedicated to protecting the great man against the importunities of the academic world and soothing his despair at no longer being able to achieve an erection or an original thought. ~ David Lodge

I just can't see the upside in this," I heard myself say by way of explanation.

Later he said that if John had been sitting in the office he would have found this funny, as he himself had found it. "Of course I knew what you meant to say, and John would have known too, you meant to say you couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel."

I agreed, but this was not in fact the case.

I had meant pretty much exactly what I said: I couldn't see the upside in this.

As I thought about the difference between the two sentences I realized that my impression of myself had been of someone who could look for, and find, the upside in any situation. I had believed in the logic of popular songs. I had looked for the silver lining. I had walked on through the storm. It occurs to me now that these were not even the songs of my generation. They were the songs, and the logic, of the generation or two that preceded my own. The score for my generation was Les Paul and Mary Ford, "How High the Moon," a different logic altogether. It also occurs to me, not an original thought but novel to me, that the logic of those earlier songs was based on self-pity. The singer of the song about looking for the silver lining believes that clouds have come her way. The singer of the song about walking on through the storm assumes that the storm could otherwise take her down. ~ Joan Didion

Curiously, Laura Warholic is one of those novels in which the characters actually read books.You don't often see this in contemporary fiction. People resent polysyllabic words, find it showing off, never look them up, refuse to play. Words are to a writer what paint is to an artist. I am amazed at how readers refuse to enjoy the out-of-the-way fact, the astonishing detail, the original thought. Style is taken as an affront by stupid and lazy people. Just say it, they say. Sure! Should I die or should I live basically sums up Hamlet's "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy. Why didn't he just say so!? ~ Alexander Theroux

When we have the same thought again, the line of the original thought is deepened, causing what's called a memory trace. With each repetition the trace goes deeper and deeper, forming and embedding a pattern of thought. When an emotion is tied to this thought pattern, the memory trace grows exponentially stronger. ~ Lysa TerKeurst

If there's an original thought out there, I could use one right now. ~ Bob Dylan

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable. ~ H.L. Mencken

(Von Rundstedt) was not a man of great original thought nor an intellect, but never tried to conceal this. On the other hand, he had much commonsense, an ability to see both sides of an argument, and was possessed with clarity of thought, especially when it came to reducing a problem to its fundamental essentials quickly. He also had, at least until his later years, a capacity for hard work. - pg. 309-310 ~ Charles Messenger

I ain't got an original thought in my head. If it ain't got the scent of divinity to it, I ain't interested in it ~ Cormac McCarthy

No such thing as original thought. We are shadows of stars that burned before our time. ~ Tom Hiddleston

People make sequels a lot in Hollywood, and sometimes it feels like there's never an original thought. ~ Jacqueline Bisset

I feel like everything is inspired by something else. There is no 100 percent original thought. ~ Ne-Yo

Every invention begins with an original thought. You are God's original thought. You are his initiative, the fruit of his creative inspiration, his intimate design and love-dream. ~ Francois Du Toit

Then his singing paused, and he stood for a
moment to cry out softly in the vernacular of the region: 'Blest be Adonoi Elohim, King of All, who maketh bread to spring forth from the earth,' in a sort of nasal bleat. The bleat being finished, he sat again, and commenced eating.

The wanderer had come a long way indeed, thought
Brother Francis, who knew of no adjacent realm governed by a monarch with such an unfamiliar name and such strange pretensions. ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

He embraced compromise as a necessary element of public life, engaged his political foes in the passage of important legislation, and was willing to break with the base of his own party in order to do what he thought was right, whatever the price. Quaint, yes: But it happened, in America, only a quarter of a century ago. ~ Jon Meacham

He thought much but said little. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

I have acute pancreatitis."
"I thought it was just average looking. ~ Melissa Bank

Then she pulled back slightly, evening our eyes. "Did you see my face?"
My breath caught in my throat.
A satisfied smile slid across her contented face, as she closed her eyes. "I thought so. ~ J. Nathan

He says, Love yourself ... This can become the foundation of a radical transformation. Don't be afraid of loving yourself. Love totally, and you will be surprised: The day you can get rid of all self-condemnation, self-disrespect - the day you can get rid of the idea of original sin, the day you can think of yourself as worthy and loved by existence - will be a day of great blessing. From that day onward you will start seeing people in their true light, and you will have compassion. And it will not be a cultivated compassion; it will be a natural, spontaneous flow. ~ Osho

I read a lot of fantasy. I adored 'Anne of Green Gables'. But my favourite books as a child were probably Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series, about a pioneer family in the mid-19th-century American west. I often thought of them as I was writing 'The Last Runaway'. ~ Tracy Chevalier

Many psychopaths describe the traditional treatment programmes as finishing schools where they hone their skills. Where they find out that there are lots of techniques they had not thought about before. ~ Robert D. Hare

Love must be the first thought and the last thought of the day, if you wish to live in peace and happiness. ~ Leon Brown

How sweet the thought that there is (still) another & better & happier world than this. ~ Anne Lister

I love the women's movement, and I never thought of it as belonging to any particular segment of the population. ~ Alice Walker

Leaders fight hard wars against
injustice and unfairness. They
believe that the truth is a weapon;
when triggered, the lie dies. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

McCoy, drained and hollow-eyed, couldn't take his eyes off the life vest belonging to the boy who'd slipped away from the group during the night. The empty vest spooked McCoy. All its straps were still tightly tied-it looked like some trick that Houdini might've played. Then McCoy peered into the water and got another shock: the boy was floating below him, spread-eagled, about fifteen feet below the surface. He lay motionless until a current caught him; then it was as if he were flying in the depths. Jesus, McCoy thought, Mother of God. He started saying the rosary over and over. McCoy had never been overly religious; his mom was the spiritual one in the family. But now he began the process of what he'd later call his purification; he'd started asking God to forgive him of his sins. He was resolved to live but he was getting ready to die. ~ Doug Stanton

Resurrection, he thought, comes not by plan or effort, and should the past ever come alive, it will be a great surprise, in which images and ritual memory will pale. ~ Mark Helprin

He had looked at Jude, then, and had felt that same sensation he sometimes did when he thought, really thought of Jude and what his life had been: a sadness, he might have called it, but it wasn't a pitying sadness; it was a larger sadness, one that seemed to encompass all the poor striving people, the billions he didn't know, all living their lives, a sadness that mingled with a wonder and awe at how hard humans everywhere tried to live, even when their days were so very difficult, even when their circumstances were so wretched. Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It's so sad, and yet we all do it. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

She thought that irritation is sometimes the most honest way of expressing love. ~ Aminah Mae Safi

I've often thought that people with severe depression have developed such a well for experiencing extreme emotion that they might be able to experience extreme joy in a way that "normal" people also might never understand, and that's what FURIOUSLY HAPPY is all about. It's about taking those moments when things are fine and making them amazing, because those moments are what make us who we are, and they're the same moments we take into battle with us when our brains declare war on our very existence. It's the difference between "surviving life" and "living life." It ~ Jenny Lawson

The original idea before Mint was a life and goal planning system I called Carpe Viva. The idea was that all of life's goals, from buying a house, getting an MBA, or learning Spanish could be quantified in both time and money. ~ Aaron Patzer

We were the untamed young bucks, testosterone and beer fueling our charge, fear alone left in the wake. Everybody thought we were a little dangerous, and that was cool. ~ A.D. Aliwat

I thought you'd be halfway to Tokyo by now," she said, stalling.
"Not without you."
Oh, man, she was so screwed. He was bad enough when he was giving her shit. Right now he was looking at her as if
she was the most precious thing on earth, and she knew what she looked and smelled like. The world had turned upside
down.
"I don't suppose you love me," she said. "Even a little bit?"
"Don't be an idiot, Ji-chan. Why else would I be here? Now, do you want to stay here or do you want to prove you're really
crazy and come with me?"
"Will you grow your hair again?"
"If you want me to."
"Then tell me."
"You're not going to make this easy, are you? Su-chan warned me about you."
"She warned me, too. Tell me."
He let out a long-suffering sigh. "Aishiteru," he muttered.
"In English."
"I love you. ~ Anne Stuart

When you spend half a decade of your life with someone, the ending should occur in a personal fashion. Face to face, hand in hand. Words spoken out of lips kissed, tears shed on seen cheeks. It shouldn't be easy; it should be painful and honest; it should take hours instead of minutes; it should involve yells and cries and discussions, but it should be substantial. A moment thought over and worked out. Not the casual and simple act of a stranger handing over a legal envelope. ~ Alessandra Torre

. . I may actually do what I've pretended many times to have done: use my judo in self-defense. To save my - virginity? My life, she thought. But more likely he is just some poor low-class wop laboring slob with delusions of glory; he wants to go on a grand spree, spend all his money, live it up - and then go back to his monotonous existence. And he needs a girl to do it. ~ Philip K. Dick

You need to be clever to best him. Are you clever, Rachel?"
Oh God. She wants to know if I'm clever. I glanced at Al, and he stared at me, then shrugged. Licking my lips, I said, "It's the shiny pot that puts a hole in the sky."
Al's mouth dropped open, but Newt thought about it, her expression thoughtful and her fingers finally leaving her knife. "Very true," she said as she eased back into the cushions.
With a soft click of his teeth, Al's mouth shut. His eyes were cross, and he seemed peeved that I'd found a way to satisfy her without compromising myself at all. ~ Kim Harrison

And here I thought you were open-minded." "I'm not," she said, ~ Judith Arnold

You mean something like 'truth or dare'? I haven't played that in a long time." She didn't think he would ever get himself entangled in a game like that, but it was addictive, a compromising icebreaker featuring all the strategy of Poker, minus the cards, mixed with a dash of danger from Russian Roulette, without the revolver. ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

There were about thirty of them, I think - all women; all seated at tables, bearing drinks and books and papers. You might have passed any one of them upon the street, and thought nothing; but the effect of their appearance all combined was rather queer. They were dressed, not strangely, but somehow distinctly. They wore skirts - but the kind of skirts a tailor might design if he were set, for a dare, to sew a bustle for a gent. Many seemed clad in walking-suits or riding-habits. Many wore pince-nez, or carried monocles on ribbons. There were one or two rather startling coiffures; and there were more neckties than I had ever seen brought together at any exclusively female ensemble. ~ Sarah Waters

Jesus," A.J. said, because he still hadn't gotten used to Jamie popping in and out like that. He still couldn't believe his eyes - if it truly were his eyes that needed to be believed, and not his brain that was responsible for sending him hallucinations of the old man he'd adored back when he was a child and life was so much less complicated.
And great, now Alison was looking at him as if he'd just shouted Jesus in the middle of her office, which he had, and there was nothing to do about it but plunge onward. "Yes, Jesus, yes," he said, which sounded even more stupid than he'd thought it would. ~ Suzanne Brockmann

Halt?" he said diffidently. He heard a deep sigh from the short, slightly built man riding beside him. Mentally he kicked himself.
I thought you must be coming down with some illness for a moment there," Halt said straight faced. "It must be two or three minutes since you've asked a question." Commited now, Horace continued.
One of those girls," he began, and immediately felt the Ranger's eyes on him. "She was wearing a very short skirt."
There was the slightest pause.
Yes?" Halt prompted, not sure where this conversation was leading. Horace shrugged uncomfortably. The memory of the girl, and her shapely legs, was causing his cheeks to burn with embarrassment again.
Well," he said uncertainly, "I just wondered if that was normal over, that's all." Halt considered the serious young face beside him. He cleared his throat several times.
I believe that sometimes Gallican girls take jobs as couriers.
he said.
Couriers. They carry messages from one person to another. Or from one buisness to another, in towns and cities." Halt checked to see if Horace seemed to believe him so far. There seemed no reason to think otherwise, so he added: "Urgent messages."
Urgent messages," Horace replied, still not seeing the connection. But he seemed inclined to believe what Halt was saying, so the older man continued.
And I suppose for a really urgent message, one would have to run."
Now he saw a glimmer of understanding in the boy's eyes. Hor ~ John Flanagan

There's a theme that appears in much of your work," I say to Maurice on my last visit to Connecticut, "and I can only hint at it because it's difficult to formulate or describe. It has something to do with the lines: 'As I went over the water/the water went over me' [from As I Went over the Water] or 'I'm in the milk and the milk's in me' [from Night Kitchen]."

"Obviously I have one theme, and it's even in the book I'm working on right now. It's not that I have such original ideas, just that I'm good at doing variations on the same idea over and over again. You can't imagine how relieved I was to find out that Henry James admitted he had only a couple of themes and that all of his books were based on them. That's all we need as artists - one power-driven fantasy or obsession, then to be clever enough to do variations… like a series of variations by Mozart. They're so good that you forget they're based on one theme. The same things draw me, the same images…"

"What is this one obsession?"

"I'm not about to tell you - not because it's a secret, but because I can't verbalize it."

"There's a line by Bob Dylan in 'Just Like a Woman' which talks about being 'inside the rain.'"

"Inside the rain?"

"When it's raining outside," I explain, "I often feel inside myself, as if I were inside the rain… as if the rain were my self. That's the sense I get from Dylan's image and from your books as well."

"It's strange y ~ Jonathan Cott

We will see that our new attitude toward liquor has been given to us without any thought or effort on our part. It just comes! That is the miracle of it. ~ William Griffith Wilson

A third position has been called "strong Al." When the Mind As Computer metaphor is believed as a deep scientific truth, the true believers interpret the ontology and the inferential patterns that the metaphor imposes on the mind as defining the essence of mind itself. For them, concepts are formal symbols, thought is computation (the manipulation of those symbols), and the mind is a computer program. ~ George Lakoff

I think the terminology I would use is 'a continuous process of reflection'. I've always thought of only two questions that have mattered to me personally. One is what is really needed in the world and the second is what's really important to me and how these two intersect. It's always been a reflective process - spiraling around these two poles. ~ Peter Senge

He blinks, then chuckles a little, relaxing as if Bronca calling a spade a spade has finally made him feel better about the whole thing. Probably gets laid a lot with that face, but no idea how to do an actual relationship. Also figures that the personification of Manhattan is two-spirit, too. She snorts a little at the thought. Maybe Stonewall was worth something after all. Anyway. ~ N.K. Jemisin

That must be something to discover a book that nobody's ever heard of or everybody thought was lost."
"It's every bibliophile's dream," said Francis, and Peter knew in a second that it was his own. ~ Charlie Lovett

You have to rely on your support system. Growing up, I always thought it was a sign of weakness to ask for help, but now I realize it's really a sign of strength to say, 'I need help, I can't do it all.' ~ Kerri Walsh