The Thoughts Of A Good Man Quotes & Sayings

A man that is of Copernicus' Opinion, that this Earth of ours is a Planet, carry'd round and enlightn'd by the Sun, like the rest of them, cannot but sometimes have a fancy ... that the rest of the Planets have their Dress and Furniture, nay and their Inhabitants too as well as this Earth of ours. ... But we were always apt to conclude, that 'twas in vain to enquire after what Nature had been pleased to do there, seeing there was no likelihood of ever coming to an end of the Enquiry ... but a while ago, thinking somewhat seriously on this matter (not that I count my self quicker sighted than those great Men [of the past], but that I had the happiness to live after most of them) me thoughts the Enquiry was not so impracticable nor the way so stopt up with Difficulties, but that there was very good room left for probable Conjectures. — Christiaan Huygens

When a good man lends himself to the advocacy of slavery, he must, at least for a time, feel himself to be any where but at home, amongst his new thoughts, doctrines, and modes of reasoning. — Gerrit Smith

It was the very fact of the note, stuck on my windshield on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota, hundreds of miles from where Fatback had lived and, apparently, died. That, and the small deerskin pouch of tobacco that was tied to it. Fatback was a black Lab - a good dog - who had belonged to Dan, an elderly Lakota man who lived far out on the Dakota plains. Years before, as a result of a book of elders' memories I had done with students at Red Lake, Dan had contacted me to come out to his home to speak with him. His request was vague, and I had been both skeptical and apprehensive. But, reluctantly, I had gone, and it had changed my life. We had worked together, traveled together, and created a book together in which the old man told his stories and memories and thoughts about Indian people and our American land. — Kent Nerburn

Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye; these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can't ye no do it; the words filling yer head: then the other words; there's something wrong; there's something far far wrong; ye're no a good man, ye're just no a good man. Edging back into awareness, of where ye are: here, slumped in this corner, with these thoughts filling ye. And oh christ his back was sore; stiff, and the head pounding. He shivered and hunched up his shoulders, shut his eyes, rubbed into the corners with his fingertips; seeing all kinds of spots and lights. Where in the name of fuck ... — James Kelman

French wines may be said but to pickle meat in the stomach, but this is the wine that digests, and doth not only breed good blood, but it nutrifieth also, being a glutinous substantial liquor; of this wine, if of any other, may be verified that merry induction: That good wine makes good blood, good blood causeth good humors, good humors cause good thoughts, good thoughts bring forth good works, good works carry a man to heaven, ergo, good wine carrieth a man to heaven. — James Howell

OPENING VERSES by PASTOR THIEME

HEB 4:12
The word of God is alive and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing asunder of the soul and the spirit, of the joints and marrow, and is a critic of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

2TI 3:16-17
All Scripture is God breathed and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness; that the man of God may be mature, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.

2TI 2:15
Study to show yourself approved unto God as a workman who need not be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. — R.B. Thieme Jr.

A fish, which you can't see, deep down in the water, is a kind of symbol of peace on earth, good will to yourself. Fishing gives a man ... some time to collect his thoughts and reaarange them kind of neatly, in an orderly fashion. Once the bait is on the hook and the boat is anchored, there's nothing to interfere with thinking except an occasional bite — Robert Ruark

Tell me, now, fairy as you are, - can't you give me a charm, or a philter, or something of that sort, to make me a handsome man?"
It would be past the power of magic, sir;" and, in thought, I added,"a loving eye is all the charm needed: to such you are handsome enough; or rather, your sternness has a power beyond beauty." Mr. Rochester had sometimes read my unspoken thoughts with an acumen to me incomprehensible: in the presnt instance he took no notice of my abrupt vocal response; but he smiled at me with a certain smile he had of his own, and which he used but on rare occasions. He seemed to think too good for common purpose: it was the real sunshine of feeling-he shed it over me now. — Charlotte Bronte

But after all
I say this as a kind of afterthought in conclusion
why bother with success at all? I have observed that the successful people get very little real enjoyment out of life. In fact the contrary is true. If I had to choose
with an eye to having a really pleasant life
between success and ruin, I should prefer ruin every time. I have several friends who are completely ruined
some two or three times
in a large way of course; and I find that if I want to get a really good dinner, where the champagne is just as it ought to be, and where hospitality is unhindered by mean thoughts of expense, I can get it best at the house of a ruined man. — Stephen Leacock

But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct. No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately. — Jane Austen

If ill thoughts at any time enter into the mind of a good man, he doth not roll them under his tongue as a sweet morsel. — Matthew Henry

For nowhere, either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble, does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately in perfect tranquillity; and I affirm that tranquillity is nothing else than the good ordering of the mind. — Marcus Aurelius

Yes, I am finally a match for Amy. The other morning I woke up next to her, and I studied the back of her skull. I tried to read her thoughts. For once I didn't feel like I was staring into the sun. I'm rising to my wife's level of madness. Because I can feel her changing me again: I was a callow boy, and then a man, good and bad. Now at last I'm the hero. I am the one to root for in the never-ending war story of our marriage. It's a story I can live with. Hell, at this point, I can't imagine my story without Amy. She is my forever antagonist.
We are one long frightening climax. — Gillian Flynn

The mind of the greatest man on earth is not so independent of circumstances as not to feel inconvenienced by the merest buzzing noise about him; it does not need the report of a cannon to disturb his thoughts. The creaking of a vane or a pully is quite enough. Do not wonder that he reasons ill just now; a fly is buzzing by his ear; it is quite enough to unfit him for giving good counsel. — Blaise Pascal

Reality [ ... ] at every level from photons to philosophical fancies to the consciousness of living organisms was fluid [ ... ]. To break apart and confine this reality into separate categories created by the mind was foolish and futile, much like trying to capture a ray of light inside a dark wooden box. This urge to categorize was the true fall of man [ ... ] the infinite became finite, good opposed evil, thoughts hardened into beliefs, one's joys and discoveries became dreadful certainties, man became alienated from what he perceived as other ways and other things, and, ultimately, divided against himself, body and soul. [ ... ] Always seeking meaning, always making their lives safe and comfortable, human beings do not truly live. — David Zindell

It is the black work of an ungodly man or an atheist, that God is not in all his thoughts. What comfort can be had in the being of God without thinking of him with reverence and delight? A God forgotten is as good as no God to us. — Stephen Charnock

... A MAN WHO HAS GIVEN HIS HEART TO LEARNING AND TRUE WISDOM AND EXERCISED THAT PART OF HIMSELF IS SURELY BOUND, IF HE ATTAINS TO TRUTH, TO HAVE IMMORTAL AND DIVINE THOUGHTS, AND CANNOT FAIL TO ACHIEVE IMMORTALITY AS FULL AS IS PERMITTED TO HUMAN NATURE; AND BECAUSE HE HAS ALWAYS LOOKED AFTER THE DIVINE ELEMENT IN HIMSELF AND KEPT HIS GUARDIAN SPIRIT IN GOOD ORDER HE MUST BE HAPPY ABOVE ALL MEN — Plato

The reason that we have both good and wicked thoughts together is not, as some suppose, because the Holy Spirit and the devil dwell together in our intellect, but because we have not yet consciously experienced the goodness of the Lord. As I have said before, grace at first conceals its presence in those who have been baptized, waiting to see which way the soul inclines; but when the whole man has turned toward the Lord, it then reveals to the heart its presence there with a feeling words cannot express. — Diadochos Of Photiki

My prayer is simple. I say it silently. 'Lord, i cry unto me! Give ear!' Man is crafty only in evil, but he's so simple and open in his plain words of love. Even for philosophers, the word is only an approximation of the thought they have experienced. The word genuinely attunes to what's in our soul only in prayer, and in prayerful thoughts. I can feel it physically. 'Lord, I cry unto me! Give ear!' And man too. Man frightens me, but I always like meeting one. A good man. That's it. — Svetlana Alexievich

Let each man think himself an act of God, His mind a thought, his life a breath of God; And let each try, by great thoughts and good deeds, To show the most of Heaven he hath in him. — Philip James Bailey

man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: [152] they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when [153] the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. There — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Happiness and sadness are just two eternal truths like day and night. A man of superior intellect is never affected by these emotions. They are not base emotions at all but a reflection of our thoughts, a reaction to our perspective on things we see, hear and do. Equanimity is not only desirable in a warrior, but a must. Without it, you are as good as dead in the battlefield. — Anand Neelakantan

The vulgar look upon a man, who is reckoned a fine speaker, as a phenomenon, a supernatural being, and endowed with some peculiargift of Heaven; they stare at him, if he walks in the park, and cry, that is he. You will, I am sure, view him in a juster light, and nulla formidine. You will consider him only as a man of good sense, who adorns common thoughts with the graces of elocution, and the elegancy of style. The miracle will then cease. — Lord Chesterfield

It struck me that perhaps a lot of the people you see walking about are dead. We say that a man's dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. After all, parts of your body don't stop working -hair goes on growing for years, for instance. Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea. Old Porteous is like that. Wonderfully learned, wonderfully good taste - but he's not capable of change. Just says the same things and thinks the same thoughts over and over again. There are a lot of people like that. Dead minds, stopped inside. Just keep moving backwards and forwards on the same little track, getting fainter all the time, like ghosts. — George Orwell

A particular train of thought persisted in, be it good or bad, cannot fail to produce its results on the character and circumstances. A man cannot directly choose his circumstances, but he can choose his thoughts, and so indirectly, yet surely, shape his circumstances. — James Allen

The only remedy for bad habits is counter habits; all the bad habits that have left their impressions are to be controlled by good habits. Go on doing good, thinking holy thoughts continuously; that is the only way to suppress base impressions. Never say any man is hopeless, because he only represents a character, a bundle of habits, which can be checked by new and better ones. Character is repeated habits, and repeated habits alone can reform character. — Swami Vivekananda

Jean Valjean had undertaken to teach her to read. Sometimes, as he made the child spell, he remembered that it was with the idea of doing evil that he had learned to read in prison. This idea had ended in teaching a child to read. Then the ex-convict smiled with the pensive smile of the angels. He felt in it a premeditation from on high, the will of some one who was not man, and he became absorbed in revery. Good thoughts have their abysses as well as evil ones. — Victor Hugo

Had you or I been born at the Bay of Soldania, possibly our Thoughts, and Notions, had not exceeded those brutish ones of the Hotentots that inhabit there: And had the Virginia King Apochancana, been educated in England, he had, perhaps been as knowing a Divine, and as good a Mathematician as any in it. The difference between him, and a more improved English-man, lying barely in this, That the exercise of his Facilities was bounded within the Ways, Modes, and Notions of his own Country, and never directed to any other or farther Enquiries. — John Locke

To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibres of men's thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness, and we no longer produce tar and turpentine. — Henry David Thoreau

Amusement should be used to do us good "like a medicine": it must never be used as the food of the man ... Many have had all holy thoughts and gracious resolutions stamped out by perpetual trifling. Pleasure so called is the murderer of thought. This is the age of excessive amusement: everybody craves for it, like a babe for its rattle. — Charles Spurgeon

From Lee's extensive quotes of Edwards on page 152 we can gather that the reason some reject good thoughts that might order their minds aright is because of a disposition of the heart, or a "taste" for evil. The habit of a person's mind is in accordance with his spiritual appetite, a good man's mind will always suggest and supply good and holy thoughts to connect ideas and information to create a beautiful picture in one's mind of God's orderly universe (Himself at the helm) but the evil man's mind is habitually disorganizing the things of this world or rather dis-integrating them from the knowledge of God, and so Edwards might say that his mind is not a cosmos but a chaos, or a conductor-less cacophony rather than a grand symphony. — Erick John Blore

A wise man will know what game to play to-day, and play it. We must not be governed by rigid rules, as by the almanac, but let the season rule us. The moods and thoughts of man are revolving just as steadily and incessantly as nature's. Nothing must be postponed. Take time by the forelock. Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this. Where the good husbandman is, there is the good soil. Take any other course, and life will be a succession of regrets. Let us see vessels sailing prosperously before the wind, and not simply stranded barks. There is no world for the penitent and regretful. — Henry David Thoreau

Hurrying forward, he opened the door a crack to see Little Willy lumbering down the stairs. The man was a giant. His fists were nearly as large as his head, which was admittedly small for his body. Radcliffe supposed he should be grateful that those fists had only squeezed his behind. Had the man hit him with one of them, he probably would have killed him with the first blow.
Radcliffe sighed at his own thoughts. Dresses, he decided, were hard on a man's ego. They affected his confidence poorly. Any other time he would have thought the man was large but slow on his feet and that he could easily have outwitted him. In the dress, all he could think was that he would trip himself up with his own skirts and be lucky to survive. He had to find Charlie, get her out of there, and get the damn thing off. Then he would lecture his wife soundly on never ever getting herself in such a dangerous predicament again ... for all the good that would do. — Lynsay Sands

If we do not like what is happening to us, it is a sure sign that we are in need of a change of mental diet. For man, we are told, lives not by bread alone but by every Word that proceeds from the mouth of God. And having discovered the mouth of God to be the mind of man, a mind which lives on Words or inner talking, we should feed into our minds only loving, noble thoughts. For with Words or inner talking we build our world. Let love's lordly hand raise your hunger and thirst to all that is noble and of good report, and let your mind starve e'er you raise your hand to a cup love did not fill or a bowl love did not bless. That you may never again have to say, What have I said? What have I done, O All Powerful Human Word? — Neville Goddard

It took me many years to lose my spirit, to unlearn thinking and forget the unity. Isn't it just as if I had turned about slowly and was on a long detour from being a man to being a child, from a thinker to a childlike person? And yet, this path has been very good, and the bird in my chest has not died. But what a path this has been! I had to pass through so much stupidity, so many vices, so many errors, so much disgust, so many disappointments and woes just to begin again. But it was fitting this way; my heart says "Yes" to it and my eyes smile at it. I've had to experience despair. I've had to descend to the most foolish of all thoughts
the thought of suicide
in order to be able to experience divine grace, to hear "Om" again, to be able to sleep and awaken properly again [ ... ] Where else might my path lead me? This path is foolish; it moves in loops, and perhaps it is going around in a circle. Let it go where it likes; I want to follow it. — Hermann Hesse

It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman — Nathaniel Hawthorne

A man's value to the community depends primarily on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows. — Albert Einstein

Who has not at one time or another felt a sourness, wrath, selfishness, envy and pride, which he could not tell what to do with, or how to bear, rising up in him without his consent, casting a blackness over all his thoughts, and then as suddenly going off again, either by the cheerfulness of the sun or air, or some agreeable accident, and again at times as suddenly returning upon him? Sufficient indications are these to every man that there is a dark guest within him, concealed under the cover of flesh and blood, often lulled asleep by worldly light and amusements, yet such as will, in spite of everything, show itself... It is exceeding good and beneficial to us to discover this dark, disordered fire of our soul; because when rightly known and rightly dealt with, it can as well be made the foundation of heaven as it is of hell. — William Law

The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death. The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men. The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small yes at the center of a vast no. — Gore Vidal

Deep down, underneath all his layers of stupidity, he's a really good man. He may act out far too many selfish thoughts, says all the wrong things at all the wrong times, but behind closed doors he's a best friend. I understand that he has idiotic tendencies and I can still love him for it. He may not be someone that you feel comfortable sitting next to at a dinner party but for me, he's someone that I feel comfortable sharing my life with. — Cecelia Ahern

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one ... Humans are caught - in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too - in a net of good and evil ... There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill? — John Steinbeck