Though man a thinking being is defined,

Few use the grand prerogative of mind.

How few think justly of the thinking few!

How many never think, who think they do!

Jane Taylor (1783-1824): Essays in Rhyme. (On Morals and Manners. Prejudice.) Essay i. Stanza 45.

Though man a thinking being is defined,

Few use the grand prerogative of mind.

How few think justly of the thinking few!

How many never think, who think they do!

Jane Taylor (1783-1824): Essays in Rhyme. (On Morals and Manners. Prejudice.) Essay i. Stanza 45.

Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,

And nought is everything and everything is nought.

Horace Smith (1779-1849): Rejected Addresses. Cui Bono?

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy autumn-fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more.

Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892): The Princess. Part iv. Line 21.

O, who can hold a fire in his hand

By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?

Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite

By bare imagination of a feast?

Or wallow naked in December snow

By thinking on fantastic summer's heat?

O, no! the apprehension of the good

Gives but the greater feeling to the worse.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): King Richard II. Act i. Sc. 3.

O, who can hold a fire in his hand

By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?

Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite

By bare imagination of a feast?

Or wallow naked in December snow

By thinking on fantastic summer's heat?

O, no! the apprehension of the good

Gives but the greater feeling to the worse.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): King Richard II. Act i. Sc. 3.

Plain living and high thinking are no more.

The homely beauty of the good old cause

Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence,

And pure religion breathing household laws.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850): O Friend! I know not which way I must look.

They may seize

On the white wonder of dear Juliet's hand

And steal immortal blessing from her lips,

Who, even in pure and vestal modesty,

Still blush, as thinking their own kisses sin.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Romeo and Juliet. Act iii. Sc. 3.

A sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,—

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850): Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey.

With too much quickness ever to be taught;

With too much thinking to have common thought.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744): Moral Essays. Epistle ii. Line 97.