The picture placed the busts between

Adds to the thought much strength;

Wisdom and Wit are little seen,

But Folly's at full length.

Jane Brereton (1685-1740): On Beau Nash's Picture at full length between the Busts of Sir Isaac Newton and Mr. Pope.

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.

We understood

Her by her sight; her pure and eloquent blood

Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought

That one might almost say her body thought.

Dr John Donne (1573-1631): Funeral Elegies. On the Death of Mistress Drury.

She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;

And humble cares, and delicate fears;

A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;

And love and thought and joy.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850): The Sparrow's Nest.

Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;

Still by himself abused or disabused;

Created half to rise, and half to fall;

Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;

Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled,—

The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744): Essay on Man. Epistle ii. Line 13.

He thought as a sage, though he felt as a man.

James Beattie (1735-1803): The Hermit.

True wit is Nature to advantage dress'd,

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744): Essay on Criticism. Part ii. Line 97.

Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose,

Flushing his brow.

John Keats (1795-1821): The Eve of St. Agnes. Stanza 16.

And Thought leapt out to wed with Thought

Ere Thought could wed itself with Speech.

Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892): In Memoriam. xxiii. Stanza 4.

And what he greatly thought, he nobly dar'd.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744): The Odyssey of Homer. Book ii. Line 312.

With curious art the brain, too finely wrought,

Preys on herself, and is destroyed by thought.

Charles Churchill (1731-1764): Epistle to William Hogarth. Line 645.

Remembrance and reflection how allied!

What thin partitions sense from thought divide!

Alexander Pope (1688-1744): Essay on Man. Epistle i. Line 225.

The dome of thought, the palace of the soul.

Lord Byron 1788-1824: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Canto ii. Stanza 6.

Was never eie did see that face,

Was never eare did heare that tong,

Was never minde did minde his grace,

That ever thought the travell long;

But eies and eares and ev'ry thought

Were with his sweete perfections caught.

Mathew Roydon (Circa 1586): An Elegie; or Friend's Passion for his Astrophill.

That which is now a horse, even with a thought

The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct,

As water is in water.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Antony and Cleopatra. Act iv. Sc. 14.

But evil is wrought by want of thought,

As well as want of heart.

Thomas Hood (1798-1845): The Lady's Dream.

Exhausting thought,

And hiving wisdom with each studious year.

Lord Byron 1788-1824: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Canto iii. Stanza 107.

Me let the tender office long engage

To rock the cradle of reposing age;

With lenient arts extend a mother's breath,

Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death;

Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,

And keep awhile one parent from the sky.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744): Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. Prologue to the Satires. Line 408.

Thought is deeper than all speech,

Feeling deeper than all thought;

Souls to souls can never teach

What unto themselves was taught.

Christopher P Cranch (1813-1892): Stanzas.

On the sudden

A Roman thought hath struck him.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Antony and Cleopatra. Act i. Sc. 2.

Our very hopes belied our fears,

Our fears our hopes belied;

We thought her dying when she slept,

And sleeping when she died.

Thomas Hood (1798-1845): The Death-Bed.

The Angel ended, and in Adam's ear

So charming left his voice, that he awhile

Thought him still speaking, still stood fix'd to hear.

John Milton (1608-1674): Paradise Lost. Book viii. Line 1.

But hushed be every thought that springs

From out the bitterness of things.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850): Elegiac Stanzas. Addressed to Sir G. H. B.

Annihilating all that's made

To a green thought in a green shade.

Andrew Marvell (1620-1678): The Garden. (Translated.)

Thought is deeper than all speech,

Feeling deeper than all thought;

Souls to souls can never teach

What unto themselves was taught.

Christopher P Cranch (1813-1892): Stanzas.

Just at the age 'twixt boy and youth,

When thought is speech, and speech is truth.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832): Marmion. Introduction to Canto ii.

We figure to ourselves

The thing we like; and then we build it up,

As chance will have it, on the rock or sand,—

For thought is tired of wandering o'er the world,

And homebound Fancy runs her bark ashore.

Sir Henry Taylor (1800-18—): Philip Van Artevelde. Part i. Act i. Sc. 5.

The kings of modern thought are dumb.

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888): Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse.

And Thought leapt out to wed with Thought

Ere Thought could wed itself with Speech.

Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892): In Memoriam. xxiii. Stanza 4.

And like a passing thought, she fled

In light away.

Robert Burns (1759-1796): The Vision.

We meet thee, like a pleasant thought,

When such are wanted.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850): To the Daisy.

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,

Falling like dew upon a thought, produces

That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.

Lord Byron 1788-1824: Don Juan. Canto iii. Stanza 88.

Three poets, in three distant ages born,

Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.

The first in loftiness of thought surpass'd;

The next, in majesty; in both the last.

The force of Nature could no further go;

To make a third, she join'd the former two.

John Dryden (1631-1701): Under Mr. Milton's Picture.

This dead of midnight is the noon of thought,

And Wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars.

Mrs Barbauld (1743-1825): A Summer's Evening Meditation.

Soul of the age,

The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage,

My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by

Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie

A little further, to make thee a room.

Ben Jonson (1573-1637): To the Memory of Shakespeare.

And inasmuch as feeling, the East's gift,

Is quick and transient,—comes, and lo! is gone,

While Northern thought is slow and durable.

Robert Browning (1812-1890): Luria. Act v.

For his chaste Muse employ'd her heaven-taught lyre

None but the noblest passions to inspire,

Not one immoral, one corrupted thought,

One line which, dying, he could wish to blot.

Lord Lyttleton (1709-1773): Prologue to Thomson's Coriolanus.

Who, born for the universe, narrow'd his mind,

And to party gave up what was meant for mankind;

Though fraught with all learning, yet straining his throat

To persuade Tommy Townshend to lend him a vote.

Who too deep for his hearers still went on refining,

And thought of convincing while they thought of dining:

Though equal to all things, for all things unfit;

Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit.

Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774): Retaliation. Line 31.

Who, born for the universe, narrow'd his mind,

And to party gave up what was meant for mankind;

Though fraught with all learning, yet straining his throat

To persuade Tommy Townshend to lend him a vote.

Who too deep for his hearers still went on refining,

And thought of convincing while they thought of dining:

Though equal to all things, for all things unfit;

Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit.

Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774): Retaliation. Line 31.

The thought of our past years in me doth breed

Perpetual benediction.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850): Ode. Intimations of Immortality. Stanza 9.

Whom neither shape of danger can dismay,

Nor thought of tender happiness betray.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850): Character of the Happy Warrior.

One thought of thee puts all the pomp to flight;

Priests, tapers, temples, swim before my sight.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744): Eloisa to Abelard. Line 273.

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether 't is nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep:

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to,—'t is a consummation

Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: there's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,

The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,

The insolence of office and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover'd country from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Hamlet. Act iii. Sc. 1.

These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred,

Each softly lucent as a rounded moon;

The diver Omar plucked them from their bed,

Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.

James Russell Lowell (1819-1891): In a copy of Omar Khayyám.

A peny for your thought.

John Heywood (Circa 1565): Proverbes. Part ii. Chap. iv.

Perish that thought! No, never be it said

That Fate itself could awe the soul of Richard.

Hence, babbling dreams! you threaten here in vain!

Conscience, avaunt! Richard's himself again!

Hark! the shrill trumpet sounds to horse! away!

My soul's in arms, and eager for the fray.

Colley Cibber (1671-1757): Richard III. (altered). Act v. Sc. 3.

It must be so,—Plato, thou reasonest well!

Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,

This longing after immortality?

Or whence this secret dread and inward horror

Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul

Back on herself, and startles at destruction?

'T is the divinity that stirs within us;

'T is Heaven itself that points out an hereafter,

And intimates eternity to man.

Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought!

Joseph Addison (1672-1719): Cato. Act v. Sc. 1.

The power of thought,—the magic of the mind!

Lord Byron 1788-1824: The Corsair. Canto i. Stanza 8.

She was good as she was fair,

None—none on earth above her!

As pure in thought as angels are:

To know her was to love her.

Samuel Rogers (1763-1855): Jacqueline. Stanza 1.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Sonnet xxx.

Life is a jest, and all things show it;

I thought so once, but now I know it.

John Gay (1688-1732): My own Epitaph.

Yet sometimes, when the secret cup

Of still and serious thought went round,

It seemed as if he drank it up,

He felt with spirit so profound.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850): Matthew.

Where the statue stood

Of Newton, with his prism and silent face,

The marble index of a mind forever

Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850): The Prelude. Book iii.

O Reader! Had you in your mind

Such stores as silent thought can bring,

O gentle Reader! you would find

A tale in everything.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850): Simon Lee.

Thou, silent form, doth tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

John Keats (1795-1821): Ode on a Grecian Urn.

Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,

And nought is everything and everything is nought.

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

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not;

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822): To a Skylark. Line 86.

If I had thought thou couldst have died,

I might not weep for thee;

But I forgot, when by thy side,

That thou couldst mortal be.

Charles Wolfe (1791-1823): To Mary.

Thou wert a beautiful thought, and softly bodied forth.

Lord Byron 1788-1824: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Canto iv. Stanza 115.

Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): King Henry IV. Part II. Act iv. Sc. 5.

Large elements in order brought,

And tracts of calm from tempest made,

And world-wide fluctuation sway'd,

In vassal tides that follow'd thought.

Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892): In Memoriam. cxii. Stanza 4.

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.

Delightful task! to rear the tender thought,

To teach the young idea how to shoot.

James Thomson (1700-1748): The Seasons. Spring. Line 1149.

Two souls with but a single thought,

Two hearts that beat as one.

Von Munch Bellinghausen (1806-1871): Ingomar the Barbarian. Act ii.

In indolent vacuity of thought.

William Cowper (1731-1800): The Task. Book iv. The Winter Evening. Line 297.

Not from a vain or shallow thought

His awful Jove young Phidias brought.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882): The Problem.

When thus the heart is in a vein

Of tender thought, the simplest strain

Can touch it with peculiar power.

Thomas Moore (1779-1852): Evenings in Greece. First Evening.

Return unto thy rest, my soul,

From all the wanderings of thy thought,

From sickness unto death made whole,

Safe through a thousand perils brought.

James Montgomery (1771-1854): Rest for the Soul.

True wit is Nature to advantage dress'd,

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744): Essay on Criticism. Part ii. Line 97.

He trudg'd along unknowing what he sought,

And whistled as he went, for want of thought.

John Dryden (1631-1701): Cymon and Iphigenia. Line 84.

How happy is he born or taught,

That serveth not another's will;

Whose armour is his honest thought,

And simple truth his utmost skill!

Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639): The Character of a Happy Life.

Bright-eyed Fancy, hov'ring o'er,

Scatters from her pictured urn

Thoughts that breathe and words that burn.

Thomas Gray (1716-1771): The Progress of Poesy. III. 3, Line 2.