132 Thoughtful Quotes

In today's fast-paced world, moments of reflection can provide a much-needed pause, offering insights and inspiration that resonate deeply within us. Thoughtful quotes serve as powerful reminders of life's profound beauty and complexity, often encapsulating wisdom in just a few words. Whether you're seeking motivation, comfort, or simply a fresh perspective, our curated collection of the top 132 thoughtful quotes is designed to spark your inner contemplation and elevate your daily mindset. Dive in, and let these timeless words of wisdom illuminate your path.

1. “You've never lived what you are thinking, and that isn't good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.” - Hermann Hesse

2. “There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

3. “Habit rules the unreflecting herd.” - William Wordsworth

4. “Politeness is the art of choosing among your thoughts.” - Madame de Stael

5. “You're only a man! You've not our gifts! I can tell you! Why, a woman can think of a hundred different things at once, all them contradictory!” - Georgette Heyer

6. “We'd start slow, the way we always did, because the run, and the game, could go on for awhile. Maybe even forever.That was the thing. You just never knew. Forever was so many different things. It was always changing, it was what everything was really all about. It was twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wished would last and last. But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this: it was happening. Right then, as I ran with Wes into that bright sun, and every moment afterwards. Look, there. Now. Now. Now.” - Sarah Dessen

7. “I don't know, I don't want to talk as much. (...) It's nicer to think dear, pretty thoughts and keep them in one's heart, like treasures. I don't like to have them laughed at or wondered over.” - L.M. Montgomery

8. “Thoughts are slippery fish in a cold shallow stream.If you are intent on capturing a worthwhile one, you need to stand very still, focus very hard on somewhere outside yourself, and then simply ignore it until it gets so close that it tickles your ankles.Then, pounce.” - Vera Nazarian

9. “Thoughts and feelings change sometimes, as one crosses the frontiers.” - Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

10. “I got words in me, Jess, fighting to find a way out. Sometimes there's so many words and they get so crowded in my skull I think my head is gonna explode. I want to write them down. I've tried, but most of the time my thoughts and my feelings are bigger than what I can get on paper.” - Carolee Dean

11. “You think I'm prettyWithout any make-up onYou think I'm funnyWhen I tell the puch line wrongI know you get meSo I'll let my walls come down, down” - Katy Perry

12. “Lugares impersonales para hombres y mujeres que ganan dinero y lo gastan con la mayor rapidez posible y que piensan que, de algun modo, eso tiene sentido.” - John Katzenbach

13. “The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.” - Marcus Aurelius

14. “What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.” - John Green

15. “What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thoughts; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. They would make my fortune if I could catch them; but always the rarest, those freaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach.” - Logan Pearsall Smith

16. “We, all who live, haveA life that is livedAnd another life that is thought,And the only life we haveIt's the one that is dividedIn right or wrong.” - Fernando Pessoa

17. “Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.” - Sylvia Plath

18. “No brain at all, some of them [people], only grey fluff that's blown into their heads by mistake, and they don't Think.” - A.A. Milne

19. “It is the function of creative people to perceive relations between thoughts, or things, or forms of expressions that seem utterly different, and to be able to Connect the seemingly Unconnected".” - William Plomer

20. “Everybody has a soul." I turn to Pelly. "And that means you, too." "I'm not so sure of that," he says. "What does it feel like?" "Having a soul?" I look at Maxine, but she only shrugs. "I don't know," I tell Pelly. "I don't have anything to compare it to- you know, what not having a sould would feel like." We fall into a kind of awkward silence. I don't know about the others, but I'm working on what a soul is and not coming up with a whole lot. I mean, I just always thought of it as me- what I feel like being me. But surely Pelly feels like himself, so that means he's got a soul right? But if that's not your soul, then what is? It's weird and not something you really think about, is it?” - Charles deLint

21. “Are we our bodies? Is a small person less than a big person, then? If we were our bodies, then when we lost an arm, or a leg, would we be less, would we begin to fade from existence? No. We are the same person.We are not our bodies; we are our thoughts. As they form, they define who we are, and create the reality of our existence.” - Terry Goodkind

22. “We are not trapped by our thoughts. What we generally do, however, is create thoughts that trap us.” (p.162)” - Joshua David Stone

23. “Do not forget, do not ever forget, that you have promised me to use the money to make yourself an honest man.'Valjean, who did not recall having made any promise, was silent. The bishop had spoken the words slowly and deliberately. He concluded with a solemn emphasis:Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to what is evil but to what is good. I have bought your soul to save it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.” - Victor Hugo

24. “Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.” - Voltaire

25. “What chance combination of shadow and sound and his own thoughts had created it?” - Patricia Highsmith

26. “It was not often that she was alone like this and she did not like it. When she was alone she had to think and, these days, thoughts were not so pleasant.” - Margaret Mitchell

27. “We are addicted to our thoughts. We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking.” - Santosh Kalwar

28. “For a moment he wondered, again, if he should just give it all up. Perhaps he should go back to Italy, back to his hiding place. What made him think that he could rejoin the world of daylight?But he was tired of living in shadows. He was tired of the darkness, and of the things that lived in it. Most of all, he was tired of being alone.” - L.J. Smith

29. “I don't possess these thoughts I have --- they possess me. I don't possess these feelings I have --- They obsess me.” - Ashly Lorenzana

30. “That’s how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side a closed door that he’s lost the key for. So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well.” - Walter Mosley

31. “First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.” - Napoleon Hill

32. “I remember when your name was just another name that rolled without thought off my tongue.Now, I can’t look at your name without an abundance of sentiment attached to each letter.Your name, which I played with so carelessly, so easily, has somehow become sacred to my lips.A name I won’t throw around lightheartedly or repeat without deep thought.And if ever I speak of you, I use the English language to describe who you were to me. You are nameless, because those letters grouped together in that familiar form….. carries too much meaning for my capricious heart.” - Jamie Weise

33. “For being different, it’s easy. But to be unique, it’s a complicated thing.” - Lady Gaga

34. “The best ideas will eat at you for days, maybe even weeks, until something, some incident, some impulse, triggers you to finally express them.” - Criss Jami

35. “You are not the mind itself. For You are the Lord God of the mind. All these things are liable to change, but You remain immutable above all things.” - St. Augustine of Hippo

36. “You think you know someone by looking at his face but what can one face say about the thousand thoughts behind those eyes.” - Marianne Wiggins

37. “To understand the truth of everything,it took guts more than simply thinking.” - Toba Beta

38. “It's okay to disagree with the thoughts or opinions expressed by other people. That doesn't give you the right to deny any sense they might make. Nor does it give you a right to accuse someone of poorly expressing their beliefs just because you don't like what they are saying. Learn to recognize good writing when you read it, even if it means overcoming your pride and opening your mind beyond what is comfortable.” - Ashly Lorenzana

39. “I sit up in bed and watch her fiddle about in the back of my wardrobe. I think she's got a plan. That's what's good about Zoey. She'd better hurry up though, because I'm starting to think of things like carrots. And air. And ducks. And pear trees. Velvet and silk. Lakes. I'm going to miss ice. And the sofa. And the lounge. And the way Cal loves magic tricks. And white things- milk, snow, swans.” - Jenny Downham

40. “The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given.” - Thomas Hardy

41. “Det är ett faktum som ingen kan bestrida att hon under hela denna långa tid inte en dag vikit från min sida. Om dagarna har hon ständigt varit i mina tankar. Om nätterna har hon varit i mina drömmar.” - Stig Dagerman

42. “At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.” - Norman Maclean

43. “Omul care nu se gândeste sau nu prevede lucrurile îndepartate are necazuri aproape” - Confucius

44. “But then, he thought, most politicians are small and shabby, the sort of people who have been bullied at school.That's why they become politicians.” - Anthony Horowitz

45. “Our thoughts create our world.” - Stephen Richards

46. “Reflect your thoughts and watch others mirror them back to you.” - Stephen Richards

47. “Thoughts are strange creatures. They lead you from one thing to another. Sometimes you don’t know how you got from one to the next.” - Franny Billingsley

48. “I struggled to think pure thoughts, as Hector sucked out my psyche with his eyes.” - Tahir Shah

49. “Governments do not create, individuals create. Every invention was once just a thought inside someones head.” - William J Federer

50. “but there was nothing I could do to dim the supernovae exploding inside my brain, an endless chain of intra cranial firecrackers” - John Green

51. “Very quickly, very suddenly, words fell through my mind. They landed on the floor of my thoughts, and in there, down there, I started to pick the words up. They were excerpts of truth gathered from inside me.” - Markus Zusak

52. “Every goal first started as something in our mind. You have it all within you!” - Deborah Day

53. “What I mean is that those thoughts, they're human. And just because you turn out differently than everyone's imagined you would doesn't mean that you've failed in some way. A kid who gets teased in one school might move to a different one, and be the most popular girl there, just because no one has any other expectations of her. Or a person who goes to med school because his entire family is full of doctors might find out that what he really wants to be is an artist instead.” - Jodi Picoult

54. “A deeper thought on the surface is exactly the paradox we need.” - Nema Al-Araby

55. “The most abundant and most precious of things: Thoughts and Dreams, can be found in every corner yet as precious as diamonds.” - StridingDream

56. “Your thoughts do not create reality. They either permit it or they do not.” - Alan Cohen

57. “Las diferencias generan pequeños roces cotidianos, y, a veces, la combinación de varios de esos roces se transforman en un gran malentendido. Como consecuencia de ello, se reciben a veces críticas infundadas. Y es evidente que no es agradable que te malinterpreten o que te critiquen. Te puedes sentir profundamente herido. Es una experiencia muy dura.” - Haruki Murakami

58. “Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry.” - Paolo Bacigalupi

59. “I urge you: don't cut short these thought-trains of yours. Follow them through to their end. Your thoughts and your feelings. Follow them through and you will grow with them.” - J.M. Coetzee

60. “Мислите ни оказват непосредствено влияние върху събитията в нашия живот.” - Вадим Зеланд

61. “He was dazed, the soft thoughts sinking slowly in. A son. Even a daughter. His child. Immortality. A chance to make good. Pass on the hard lessons learned.” - Helen Hodgman

62. “Silencing the brain's ramblings gives the chance for wonderful thoughts to bloom.” - Steven Redhead

63. “Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?” - Sigmund Freud

64. “When there's a monster under your bed sometimes it really is best not to look.” - Jocelynn Drake

65. “Thoughts are like an open ocean, they can either move you forward within its waves, or sink you under deep into its abyss.” - Anthony Liccione

66. “You don’t have to stay trapped in your thoughts just because you think them.” - Doug Dillon

67. “Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.” - Eckhart Tolle

68. “Part of me wanted this more than anything else in the world—to have someone to hang out with, be like everyone else for a while. The rest of me screamed to get the hell out of there, not to get sucked in.” - Rachel Ward

69. “Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.” - Susan Sontag

70. “Mostly, when Jess didn't want to talk about her ideas in class, Colleen thought that Jess was showing off, making sure that she would be coaxed and pleaded with, but how could Jess have explained in a coherent way that she was scared? Once you let people know anything about what you think, that's it, you're dead. Then they'll be jumping about in your mind, taking things out, holding them up to the light and killing them, yes, killing them, because thoughts are supposed to stay and grow in quiet, dark places, like butterflies in cocoons.” - Helen Oyeyemi

71. “From daybreak to sunset she turned her thoughts, like boulders, over. She set them in long lines. She rearranged their order...” - Mervyn Peake

72. “If brains could have orgasms, I'm pretty sure this was what it would feel like.” - Cora Carmack

73. “Por la noche los pensamientos tienen la desagradable costumbre de escapar de su correa y correr libremente.” - Stephen King

74. “Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

75. “I thought: This is not good. I though: I am not bad at kissing. Not at bad at all. I thought: I am clearly the greatest kisser in the history of the universe.” - John Green

76. “My thoughts are wing'd with hopes,My hopes with love.Thoughts, hopes and love return to me no more,Until Cynthia shine as she hath done before.” - Eve Edwards

77. “Cosmos is God, who whispered the syllable of life.” - Dejan Stojanovic

78. “Too often, feelings arrive too soon, waiting for thoughts that often come too late.” - Dejan Stojanovic

79. “Nature is an outcry, unpolished truth; the art—a euphemism—tamed wilderness.” - Dejan Stojanovic

80. “If birth is a manifestation of life, death is another.” - Dejan Stojanovic

81. “History will be erased in the universal purgatory.” - Dejan Stojanovic

82. “He had an answer to almost everything and he retired at an early age.” - Dejan Stojanovic

83. “He tries to find the exit from himself but there is no door.” - Dejan Stojanovic

84. “Trying too hard to be too good, even when trying to be bad, is too good for the bad, too bad for the good.” - Dejan Stojanovic

85. “I fly through memory to find a newborn love.” - Dejan Stojanovic

86. “We love the imperfect shapes in nature and in the works of art, look for an intentional error as a sign of the golden key and sincerity found in true mastery.” - Dejan Stojanovic

87. “Pretense cannot sustain blind power.” - Dejan Stojanovic

88. “Since there is no real silence, Silence will contain all the sounds, All the words, all the languages, All knowledge, all memory.” - Dejan Stojanovic

89. “There is only as much space, only as much time, Only as much desire, only as many words, Only as many pages, only as much ink To accept all of us at light-speed Hurrying into the Promised Land Of oblivion that is waiting for us sooner or later.” - Dejan Stojanovic

90. “To say more while saying less is the secret of being simple.” - Dejan Stojanovic

91. “To cut and tighten sentences is the secret of mastery.” - Dejan Stojanovic

92. “To go against the grain is the secret of bravery.” - Dejan Stojanovic

93. “Words rich in meaning can be cheap in sound effects.” - Dejan Stojanovic

94. “We traveled long and forgot why poetry was invented.” - Dejan Stojanovic

95. “I imagined I was God for a millisecond And became speechless for a long time.” - Dejan Stojanovic

96. “When I want to be reminded of stupidity, especially my own, I turn on the TV.” - Dejan Stojanovic

97. “It is beautiful to talk about beautiful things and even more beautiful to silently gaze at them.” - Dejan Stojanovic

98. “Devil and God – two sides of the same face.” - Dejan Stojanovic

99. “Good is not always good.” - Dejan Stojanovic

100. “In an endless silence even screams sound silent.” - Dejan Stojanovic

101. “In every sound, the hidden silence sleeps.” - Dejan Stojanovic

102. “The world cannot be translated; It can only be dreamed of and touched.” - Dejan Stojanovic

103. “To sense the peace of extinguished passionHappiness in not knowing the ultimate knowledge” - Dejan Stojanovic

104. “From everything, nothing looks to nothing.” - Dejan Stojanovic

105. “When everything hurries everywhere, nothing goes anywhere.” - Dejan Stojanovic

106. “Earth is the source of light.” - Dejan Stojanovic

107. “What does infinity mean to you? Are you not infinity and yourself?” - Dejan Stojanovic

108. “There is nobody to wake up eternal seekers.” - Dejan Stojanovic

109. “You are not what you are; You are darkness Looking for light within.” - Dejan Stojanovic

110. “The world is always open, Waiting to be discovered.” - Dejan Stojanovic

111. “To jump over centuries In one step is impossible. Jump too high or far, You’ll be way too late.” - Dejan Stojanovic

112. “Life eats life to live.” - Dejan Stojanovic

113. “Neither alive nor dead; No one lets up, No one wins.” - Dejan Stojanovic

114. “One hand I extend into myself, the other toward others.” - Dejan Stojanovic

115. “I recreate myself; that is my only power.” - Dejan Stojanovic

116. “I enjoy it when the world smiles; the more smiles, the warmer I am.” - Dejan Stojanovic

117. “Creating means living.” - Dejan Stojanovic

118. “My mathematics is simple: one plus one = one.” - Dejan Stojanovic

119. “What you gain here, you lose on the other side.” - Dejan Stojanovic

120. “While gazing at myself from yourself, I was beautiful.” - Dejan Stojanovic

121. “We don’t know anything about silent sages, buried knowledge, the eye of the mute poet, serene seers, yet how many talkative destroyers, prophets and ideologues, teachers and beautifiers there are on the other side.” - Dejan Stojanovic

122. “They are both spectacular, Life and death.” - Dejan Stojanovic

123. “I had been brought up to be something of an intellectual, but there seemed at the time no connection between my newly formed ideas and the world to which I had returned. Indeed, I did not even recognize my ideas as ideas at all: they seemed to be culled from somewhere else and did not belong to me. I did not know then what I am just beginning to know now: that my ideas were indeed mine, that I had reacted and changed and moved, that I had already analyzed and synthesized, rejecting some thoughts, adopting others, putting yet others away for a while to be thought on. I did not recognize how mentally active an individual I had become, already divorced from the world through my own thoughts, my own perceptions of right and wrong, of honour and justice, of what mattered and what did not. (2007: 117)” - Jean Said Makdisi

124. “A mind is not weighed by its magnitude, but by the dimensions of its thoughts.” - Anthony Liccione

125. “...Heracles was strangely silent. What is he thinking? / Geryon wondered. / Geryon watched prehistoric rocks move past the car and thought about thoughts. / Even when they were lovers / he had never known what Herakles was thinking. Once in a while he would say, / Penny for your thoughts! / and it always turned out to be some odd thing like a bumper sticker or a dish / he'd eaten in a Chinese restaurant years ago. / What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them / developed a dangerous cloud.” - Anne Carson

126. “In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels” - Daniel Goleman

127. “You can think all you can but don't publicize all your thoughts” - Bernard Kelvin Clive

128. “Thoughts, like water, will stay on course if we make a place for them to go. As you learn to control your thoughts, you can gain courage, conquer fear and have a happy life.” - Boyd K. Packer

129. “When we’re not true to our thoughts and not true to the feelings we have deep inside, we find ourselves unhappy. Be courageous enough to align your life with your feelings, desires, and sense of purpose.” - Steve Maraboli

130. “I want to douse myself in silver words and whisper away all rue.” - Basith

131. “Ideas and thoughts are like genes...more you keep inside yourself more it multply with same species consuming your whole energy to breed to produce same old ideas and thoughts again and again until it kills you. So, let it be interact with other species..take it out...make reaction with other peoples's thoughts and ideas and produce something new....produce new energy..new thoughts..new perceptions...” - Jagdish Poudel

132. “Sometimes both your mind and thoughts are paying the cost of your stupid heart.” - M.F. Moonzajer