“Thought: To think you can change your life by changing its outward conditions is just like thinking, as I did as a boy, that by sitting on a stick and taking hold of it at both ends I could lift myself up.”
Leo Tolstoy
more infosource: January 15, 1891 entry, in Tolstoy’s Diaries Volume 1, 1847–1894, trans. by R. F. Christian (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 300.
category: change, illusion, thought, transformation
medium: Journal
“If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same…”
Rudyard Kipling
more infosource: “If,” in The New World Edition of the Works of Rudyard Kipling (New York: Garden City, 1910 ), 167.
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category: disaster, dream, thought, triumph
medium: Poetry
via: Maceo Thompson (thanks, Mace!)“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
William Shakespeare
more infosource: Hamlet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), Folger Shakespeare Library pb edition, 99.
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category: bad, good, perspective, thought
medium: play
“Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way—towards a busy street or terminal—before they run out of their burrows.”
Alain de Botton
more infosource: A Week at the Airport (New York: Vintage, 2010), 42.
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category: creative process, originality, shy, thought, writing
medium: nonfiction
“Therapy, you might say, became a kind of release valve for my life; it gave me a place to say the things I could say nowhere else, express the feelings that would be laughed at or frowned upon in the outside world — and in so doing helped to alleviate the insistent pressure of my darker thoughts.”
Daphne Merkin
more infosource: “My Life in Therapy,” The New York Times, August 4, 2010.
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category: emotion, expression, psychology, shrink, therapy, thought
medium: magazine article
thought