Thomas Gray Quotes

Ignorance is bliss. I wish I still had some.

Babies are unreasonable; they expect far too much of existence. Each new generation that comes takes one look at the world, thinks wildly, "Is this all they've done to it?" and bursts into tears.

To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing.

To think is to destroy.

They paved paradise and put up a parkin lot With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin' hot spot Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you got till it's gone

We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile.

I'm sure we all can remember back in the day when you're 17, naïve, you're sort of just this unblemished teenager. You're sort of sheltered and haven't really seen the real world and then when you do see it, you're just like... "This is the world? This is reality?"

I've been around the movie business, so I can play it cool and all that, but when people are different they have that off thing about them. Their whole presence is just a little innocent, I think.

Don't you think it's sometimes wise not to grow up.

Adults always wonder what to say and how to say it when they're talking to a child. You want to be wise, but all you are is a child yourself in a larger body. Nothing is ever what it seems. The things that you think you know are never certain. I know that now. I wish that I didn't, but I do.

In its natural state, the child tells the literal truth because it is too naive to think of anything else. Blurting out the complete truth is considered adorable in the young, right smack up to the moment that the child says, 'Mommy, is this the fat lady you can't stand?

Now that I think about it, it seems to me that’s what Idiocy is: the ability to be enthusiastic all the time about anything you like, so that a drawing on the wall does not have to be diminished by the memory of the frescoes of Giotto in Padua.

The great challenge of adulthood is holding on to your idealism after you lose your innocence.

Sometimes when you're young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you're living on someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been. Then we grow up and our hearts break into two.

Physics is an otherworld thing, it requires a taste for things unseen, even unheard of- a high degree of abstraction... These faculties die off somehow when you grow up... profound curiosity happens when children are young. I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race... Once you are sophisticated, you know too much- far too much. Pauli once said to me, "I know a great deal. I know too much. I am a quantum ancient.".

Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore

What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!

For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.

Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence.

Nobody's that naive," she muttered. "Nobody's that guileless." "He's from Nebraska." Peabody scanned her pocket unit. "From where?" "Nebraska." Peabody waived a hand, vaguely west.... "They still grow them pretty guileless in Nebraska. I think it's all that soy and corn.

If we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse.

Thinking is different from perceiving and is held to be in part imagination, in part judgment

People say, "I can't take you seriously because you're so young." But I think when you're young, what you feel is more pure.

Thinking does not lead to truth; truth is the beginning of thought.