Quotes & Sayings About Being Lost In Your Thoughts

I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minority of the writers on my shelves who have struggled with words and thoughts and, by my lights, have lost the struggle. All together they are my community, the creators of the very idea of books, poetry, and extended narratives, and of the amazing human conversation that has taken place across the millennia, through weal and woe, over the heads of interest and utility. — Marilynne Robinson

It was a wise and useful provision of the ancients to transmit their thoughts to posterity by recording them in treatises, so that they should not be lost, but, being developed in succeeding generations through publications in books, should gradually attain in later times, to the highest refinement of learning. — Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

Attachments made men soft. This fact was made obvious lately by my buddies.
I blamed Tucker. A little over a year earlier, the idiot strolled over to a table filled with college girls. Each one shot him down until he was left with Maddy. For whatever reason, she thought he was funny. Or maybe just hot enough to overcome his lack of brain cells. They hooked up and he quickly handed his balls to her with a ribbon tied around them. He acted like he was still his own man, but the guy was whipped to the point of being fluffy.
Once he lost his way, the others fell like dominoes. — Bijou Hunter

Thus repulsed, our final hope
Is flat despair: we must exasperate
The Almighty Victor to spend all his rage;
And that must end us; that must be our cure,
To be no more. Sad cure! for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense and motion? And who knows,
Let this be good, whether our angry Foe
Can give it, or will ever? How he can
Is doubtful; that he never will is sure.
John Milton, Belial
(Book II Paradise Lost) — John Milton

From the contemplative point of view, being lost in thoughts of any kind, pleasant or unpleasant, is analogous to being asleep and dreaming. It's a mode of not knowing what is actually happening in the present moment. It is essentially a form of psychosis. — Sam Harris

We are what we think." How many times do you think of positive things? Have you ever given thought to the type of thoughts you have? There is much more to your thoughts than being merely ideas because they have a lot of power in them. The actions that we indulge in are a direct outcome of the thoughts that we think. This is why you need to control your thoughts. Do not let them wander because if your thoughts are lost, you might end up being trapped too. There is a huge science behind the logic of how our thoughts shape who we are and this science is summed in the Law of Attraction. — Nathan Powers

He had lost that privilege of simple nature, the dissociation of love and pleasure. Pleasure was no longer as simple as eating; it was being complicated by love. Now was beginning that crazy loss of one's self, that neglect of everything but one's dramatic thoughts about the beloved, that feverish inner life all turning upon the [loved one]. — Thornton Wilder

Centering our thoughts on God begins with what I like to call discovery. That is, when we discover a great truth about God, we begin to meditate on that truth until it captivates our whole thinking process. That in turn will lead to worship.
If worship is based on meditation, and meditation is based on discovery, what is discovery based on? On time spent with God in prayer and the Word. It is sad that many view prayer primarily as a way to get things. We have lost sight of the companion aspect of prayer - of being still and aware of God's wonderful presence and just communing with Him there. — John F. MacArthur Jr.

You are not lost. It's just that your own thoughts are being kept from you, or hidden away. But the mind is strong. It survives, even without thought. Even with everything taken away, it holds a seed
your self. You must believe in your own powers. — Haruki Murakami

In a time so filled with methods and techniques designed to change people, to influence their behavior, and to make them do new things and think new thoughts, we have lost the simple but difficult gift of being present to each other. We have lost this gift because we have been led to believe that presence must be useful. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

When you are present, you are transcendent of the mind and ego and so you can witness your mind and ego. You can be conscious of your thoughts without being lost in them when they arise. — Leonard Jacobson

She simply observed herself as a fair product of Nature in the feminine kind, her thoughts seeming to glide into far-off though likely dramas in which men would play a part - vistas of probable triumphs - the smiles being of a phase suggesting that hearts were imagined as lost and won. — Thomas Hardy

I stare at the table for a moment, lost in thoughts of what it will be like to hold a human being that I made in my hands. I can write a song and I can play it until my fingers bleed, but I can't carry music in my hands. I can't touch it or smell it. I can't give it my heart. — Cassia Leo

Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben. (What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.) Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind. — Viktor E. Frankl

Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts. — Rebecca Solnit

And that must end us, that must be our cure:
To be no more. Sad cure! For who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish, rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night
Devoid of sense and motion? — John Milton

Opting out of telling her that he'd also been lost in thoughts of imprinting on her, Dante instead said, "Give me a number between one and twenty."
Unable to see where this was going, she shrugged. "Eleven."
"You lose. Now strip off your clothes."
She laughed, adoring how roguish he could be sometimes. Despite being a naturally good-humored person, he was only ever this playful with her. — Suzanne Wright

We are gradually losing the art of silence. Of walking down the street lost in our own thoughts. Of closing the door to our rooms and being quiet. Of sitting on a park bench and just thinking. We may fear silence because we fear what we might hear from the deepest parts of ourselves. We may be afraid to hear that "still small" voice. What might it say? Might it ask us to change? — James Martin

I've lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. — Terry Pratchett

And so when you have lost everything, no more roads, no direction, no fixed signs, no ground, no thoughts able to resist other thoughts, when you are lost, beside yourself, and you continue getting lost, when you become the panicky movement of getting lost, then, that's when, where you are unwoven weft, flesh that lets strangeness come through, defenseless being, without resistance, without batten, without skin, inundated with otherness, it's in these breathless times that writings traverse you, songs of an unheard-of purity flow through you, addressed to no one, they well up, surge forth, from the throats of your unknown inhabitants, these are the cries that death and life hurl in their combat. — Helene Cixous

Please, when I come home, don't forget the "soul" ... and I don't mean "sweet sayings" ... I mean the truth, the sharing of our inmost thoughts, good or bad ... lost or comforting. That is the soul. I think it. The soul, is I think, a human being who speaks with the pressure of death at his head. That's how I'd phrase it. The self in trouble ... not just the self without love (as us) but the self as it will always be (with gun at its head finally) ... To live and know it is only for a moment ... that is to know "the soul" ... and it increases closeness and despair and happiness ... — Anne Sexton

[We] have a tendency during meetings to let our minds run wild and cycle through a plethora of thoughts about the past and the future, destroying any aspirations for Zen-like calm and preventing us from being in the here and now: Did I turn off the stove? What will I do for lunch? When do I need to leave here in order to get to where I need to be next?
What if you could rely on others in your life to handle these things and you could narrow your attentional filter to that which is right before you, happening right now? ... A professional musician friend ... describes this state as "happily lost." He doesn't need to look at his calendar more than a day in advance, allowing each day to be filled with wonder and possibility. — Daniel J. Levitin

Beyond thought I reach a state. I refuse to divide it up into words - and what I cannot and do not want to express ends up being the most secret of my secrets. I know that I'm scared of the moments in which I don't use thought and that's a momentary state that is difficult to reach, and which, entirely secret, no longer uses words with which thoughts are produce. Is not using words to lose your identity? is it getting lost in the harmful essential shadows? — Clarice Lispector

In this media-drenched, data-rich, channel-surfing, computer-gaming age, we have lost the art of doing nothing, of shutting out the background noise and distractions, of slowing down and simply being alone with our thoughts. — Carl Honore