Frank J. Wilstach, comp. A Dictionary of Similes. 1916.
Thought
Thoughts, like snowflakes on some far-off mountain side, go on accumulating till some great truth is loosened, and falls like an avalanche on the waiting world.
—Anonymous
Great thoughts, like great deeds, need no trumpet.
—Philip James Bailey
Dark wretched thoughts, like ice-isles in a stream, choke up my mind, and clash.
—Philip James Bailey
Thoughts, like nuns, ought not to go abroad without a veil.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Thoughts, like waves that glide by night, are stillest when they shine.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Thoughts are like persons met upon a journey; I think them very agreeable at first but soon find, as a rule, that I am tired of them.
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
Our thoughts, like the waters of the sea, when exhaled towards Heaven, will lose all their bitterness and saltness, and sweeten into an amiable humanity, until they descend in gentle showers of love and kindness upon our fellow-men.
—C. C. Colton
Curran’s airy thoughts, like purple birds that shine and soar.
—Sir Charles Gavan Duffy
Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum: it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other.
—Eugene Field
A thought would wander like a free bird over his features, flutter in his eyes, light on his parted lips, hide itself in the wrinkles of his brow, then utterly vanish away.
—Ivan A. Goncharov
Some kinds of thoughts breed in the dark of one’s mind like the blind fishes in the Mammoth cave. We can’t see them and they can’t see us; but sooner or later the daylight gets in and we find that some cold, fishy little negative has been sprawling all over our beliefs, and the brood of blind questions it has given birth to are burrowing round and under and butting their blunt notes against the pillars of faith we thought the whole world might lean on.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes
A little thought in life is like salt upon rice.
—Rudyard Kipling
Thoughts, common as clay, and the trodden earth.
—George MacDonald
My thoughts, like birds, were frightened from their nest.
—Thomas Otway
Beautiful thoughts that fall like rain
Are droughts for pleasure or balm for pain.
—Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The presence of a thought is like the presence of a loved one. We deem that we shall never forget this thought and that the loved one can never become indifferent to us. But out of sight, out of mind! The most beautiful thought runs the risk of being irrevocably forgotten if it is not written down, and the loved one to be torn from us if she has not been wedded.
—Arthur S. Schopenhauer
A thought unknown is as a thought unacted.
—William Shakespeare
An old thought turns with the old tune in my head
As a windmill turns in the wind on an empty sky.
—Arthur Symons
Sweet thoughts, like honey-bees, have made their hive of her soft bosom cell, and cluster there.
—Amelia B. Welby