Thought: concept, cogitation, consideration, deliberation, estimation, idea, imagination, reflection, consideration, speculation, supposition.
Think: ponder; muse; cogitate, deliberate, esteem, imagine, reason, reflect, seriously consider; speculate, suppose.
Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal.
As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change.
Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation – the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs & peaks.
If you watch carefully, you will see this undulation in every department of his life – his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up & down.
As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness & poverty.
Fun is closely related to Joy – a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.
THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS by C.S.LEWIS
Think of the flow of thoughts in your mind as a social media feed. Throughout your life, you have “subscribed” to different things without noticing. Now their posts keep showing up in your feed, and you don’t know from where. Some are true & interesting, but many are unhelpful or simply untrue.
Practical Meditation by Giovanni Dienstmann
A thousand years from now human beings would probably continue to die of cancer and earthquake and such clownish mishaps as slipping in bathtubs.
Mankind would continue to be burdened with eyes that grow weak, feet that grow tired, noses that itch, intestines vulnerable to bacilli, and generative organs that are nervous until the age of virtue & senility.
Most people would continue, at least for a few hundred years, to sit in chairs, eat from dishes upon tables, read books — no matter how many cunning phonographic substitutes might be invented, wear shoes or sandals, sleep in beds, write with some sort of pens, and in general spend twenty or twenty-two hours a day much as they had spent them in 1930.
Tornadoes, floods, droughts, lightning, and mosquitoes would remain, along with the homicidal tendency known in the best of citizens when their sweethearts go dancing off with other men.
And, most fatally & abysmally, men of superior cunning, of slyer foxiness, whether they might be called Comrades, Brethren, Commissars, Kings, Patriots, Little Brothers of the Poor, or any other rosy name, would continue to have more influence than slower-witted men, however worthy.
It Can’t Happen Here (1935) by Sinclair Lewis
“You know nothing of future time,” pronounced Deep Thought, “and yet in my teeming circuitry I can navigate the infinite delta streams of future probability and see that there must one day come a computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate, but which it will be my fate eventually to design.”
Fook was losing patience. He pushed his notebook aside and muttered, “I think this is getting needlessly messianic.”
HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by Douglas Adams
Brother Francis produced the blueprint. “The highwayman was kind enough to leave this in my keeping, Holy Father. He – he mistook it for a copy of the illumination which I was bringing as a gift.”
“You did not correct his mistake?”
Brother Francis blushed. “I’m ashamed to admit, Holy Father –”
“This, then, is the original relic you found in the crypt?”
“Yes –”
The Pope’s smile became wry. “So, then – the bandit thought your work was the treasure itself? Ah – even a robber can have a keen eye for art, yes? Monsignor Aguerra told us of the beauty of your commemoration. What a pity that it was stolen.”
“It was nothing, Holy Father. I only regret that I wasted fifteen years.”
“Wasted? How ‘wasted’? If the robber had not been misled by the beauty of your commemoration, he might have taken this, might he not?”
Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)
But old Dim, as soon as he’d slooshied this dollop of song like a lomtick of redhot meat plonked on your plate, let off one of his vulgarities which in this case was a lip-trump followed by a dog-howl followed by two fingers pronging twice at the air followed by a clowny guffaw.
Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess