Anne Carson Quotes

I'm in a constant process of thinking about things.

Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts.

I only think in live action.

I have always been very interested in thinking deeply about things. I do this a lot.

An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis.

We havent really paid much attention to thought as a process. we have engaged in thoughts, but we have only paid attention to the content, not to the process.

Everything, at first, is an idea, a special creation.

You have something that exists in your head, and getting that abstract thought from your head into something that actually exists is a difficult process.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

Thought means life, since those who do not think so do not live in any high or real sense. Thinking makes the man.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

I am never satisfied until I can make a mathematical model of what I am studying. If I succeed in making one, I understand. If I cannot, I do not understand.

I like to take information in and let it percolate.

Can that which is the greatest virtue in philosophy, doubt (called by Galileo the father of invention), be in religion what the priests term it, the greatest of sins?

Wit is the Fruitful Womb where Thoughts conceive.

Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling before it is an idea, and every idea rests upon other ideas that have preceded it in time.

To have ideas is to gather flowers; to think is to weave them into garlands.

Thought experiment is in any case a necessary precondition for physical experiment. Every experimenter and inventor must have the planned arrangement in his head before translating it into fact.

Thought is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate or enslave. Even before prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm, thought, at the level of its existence, in its very dawning, is in itself an action-a perilous act.

Every piece of technology, every piece of art, basically everything manmade comes from an idea.

Most writing doesn’t take place on the page; it takes place in your head.

Several times I asked myself, "Can it be that I have overlooked something, that there is something which I have failed to understand? Is it not possible that this state of despair is common to everyone?" And I searched for an answer to my questions in every area of knowledge acquired by man. For a long time I carried on my painstaking search; I did not search casually, out of mere curiosity, but painfully, persistently, day and night, like a dying man seeking salvation. I found nothing.

Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created

The bottom of being is left logically opaque to us, a datum in the strict sense of the word, something we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. In this confession lies the lasting truth of empiricism.

There was never anything that did not proceed from a thought.