Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.... Of all things of thought, poetry is the closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art ...

- Hannah Arendt


... the will always wills to do something and thus implicitly holds in contempt sheer thinking, whose whole activity depends on "doing nothing."
- Hannah Arendt

Our Last Will and Testament, providing for the only future of which we can be reasonably certain, namely our own death, shows that the Will's need to will is no less strong than Reason's need to think; in both instances the mind transcends its own natural limitations, either by asking unanswerable questions or by projecting itself into a future which, for the willing subject, will never be. LESS

- Hannah Arendt


If thinking is like perceiving, it must be either a process in which the soul is acted upon by what is capable of being thought, or a process different from but analogous to that. The thinking part of the soul must therefore be, while impassable, capable of receiving the form of an object; that is, must be potentially identical in character with its object without being the object. Mind must be related to what is thinkable, as sense is to what is sensible. 

- Aristotle

Thought is a kind of opium; it can intoxicate us, while still broad awake; it can make transparent the mountains and everything that exists.

- Henri-Frédéric Amiel