T. E. Hulme Quotes

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

A thought is an idea in transit.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

What interests me about thoughts is not the moment when it crystallises into formal ideas but its earlier stages.

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

Concepts are mental images.

Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.

The mind, in discovering truths, acts in the same manner as it acts through the eye in discovering objects; when once any object has been seen, it is impossible to put the mind back to the same condition it was in before it saw it.

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

In complex trains of thought signs are indispensable.

The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.

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

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

I've always been interested in visualizing something, whether it's a memory or an idea you want to be true. I am a big believer in that. I'm constantly thinking of that. If I can't picture something, then it doesn't make sense to me.

A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.

Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.

Thoughts without words… Can that be?

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.

My mind works like Google for images. You put in a key word; it brings up pictures. See language for me narrates the pictures in my mind.

I say then, that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain. This variety of terms, which may seem so unphilosophical, is intended only to express that act of the mind, which renders realities, or what is taken for such, more present to us than fictions, causes them to weigh more in the thought, and gives them a superior influence on the passions and imagination.

To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man.

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

The human mind has first to construct forms, independently, before we can find them in things.