Thought generally refers to any mental or intellectual activity involving an individual's subjective consciousness. It can refer either to the act of thinking or the resulting ideas or arrangements of ideas. Similar concepts include cognition, sentience, consciousness, and imagination. Because thought underlies almost all human actions and interactions, understanding its physical and metaphysical origins, processes, and effects has been a longstanding goal of many academic disciplines including, among others, biology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology.
Thinking allows beings to make sense of or model the world in different ways, and to represent or interpret it in ways that are significant to them, or which accord with their needs, attachments, objectives, plans, commitments, ends and desires.
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Famous quotes containing the word thought:
“We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Thought reading is like the circulation of the blood. We are all thought readers only we don’t pay attention to it.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“I thought that a Jewish state would be free of the evils afflicting other societies: theft, murder, prostitution.... But now we have them all. And that’s a thing that cuts to the heart ...”
—Golda Meir (1898–1978)