Quotes about Thought

Commitment is not sustained by confusion but by insight. The person who is uninformed or confused will inevitably be unstable and vulnerable in action, thought and feeling.

The aim of spiritual formation is the transformation of the self, and that it works through transformation of thought, transformation of feeling, transformation of social relations, transformation of the body, and transformation of the soul. When we work with all these, transformation of the spirit (heart, will) very largely, though not entirely, takes care of itself.

Worship is at once the overall character of the renovated thought life and the only safe place for a human being to stand.

The intention points the way, and then habituated thought and desire must be redirected to support the intention in the moments of action.

The biblical stories know absolutely nothing of blind "leaps of faith," as that phrase is now understood. Such "leaps" are a pure fantasy imposed upon those stories and upon the religious life by the prejudices and tortured turns of modern thought.

So, C. S. Lewis writes, our faith is not a matter of our hearing what Christ said long ago and "trying to carry it out." Rather, "The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to 'inject' His kind of life and thought, His Zoe [life], into you; beginning to turn the tin

They presume on their justification in being whatever they are—unlike a thought, which by nature is open to challenge and invites the question "Why?

You could say the place had a pious atmosphere. It was an atmosphere that I finally had to think about, and when I thought about it I had to admit that I could not get comfortable in it; I could not breathe a full breath in it.

Or rather that crisp command fell upon the current of his thought like a dry leaf on the surface of a deeply flowing stream, to be borne forty years away.

The university thought of itself as a place of freedom for thought and study and experimentation, and maybe it was, in a way. But it was an island too, a floating or a flying island. It was preparing people from the world of the past for the world of the future, and what was missing was the world of the present, where every body was living its small, short, surprising, miserable, wonderful, blessed, damaged, only life.

And I sat there trying to think, and failing, thinking only that whatever I would say was probably going to be a surprise to me.

Memory believes before knowing remembers.