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I trow that countenance cannot lie,
Whose thoughts are legible in the eie.
--
An Elegie, or Friends Passion, for his Astrophill, Line 108 (1586).

 

Edmund Spenser

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[ Your thoughts close and your countenance loose.]

 

George Herbert

 

When I'm awake, I don't want to go to sleep. I don't want the hassle of turning the light off, putting my head down and then all the thoughts. I don't want al those thoughts. … thoughts feed on thoughts feed on thoughts feed on thoughts feed on thoughts and I'm: 'I don't want this'. I have to knock myself out to go to sleep.

 

Robbie Williams

 

Beautiful women seldom want to act. They are afraid of emotion and they do not try to extract anything from a character that they are portraying, because in expressing emotion they may encourage crow's feet and laughing wrinkles. They avoid anything that will disturb their placidity of countenance, for placidity of countenance insures a smooth skin.

 

Laurette Taylor

 

Some one, I think it was Isaac Disraeli, said that he who did not make himself acquainted with the best thoughts of the greatest writers would one day be mortified to observe that his best thoughts are their indifferent ones, and it is from the great books that have stood the test of time that we shall get, not only the most lasting pleasure, but a standard by which to measure our own thoughts, the thoughts of others, and the excellence of the literature of our own day.

 

Edward Grey

 

A great speech is easy to learn by heart and a great poem even easier. How hard it would be to memorize as many words linked together senselessly, or a speech in a foreign tongue! Sense and understanding thus come to the aid of memory. Sense is order and order is in the last resort conformity with our nature. When we speak rationally we are only speaking in accordance with the nature of our being. That is why we devise genera and species in the case of plants and animals. The hypotheses we make belong here too: we are obliged to have them because otherwise we would unable to retain things... The question is, however, whether everything is legible to us. Certainly experiment and reflection enable us to introduce a significance into what is not legible, either to us or at all: thus we see faces or landscapes in the sand, though they are certainly not there. The introducion of symmetries belongs here too, silhouettes in inkblots, etc. Likewise the gradation we establish in the order of creatures: all this is not in the things but in us. In general we cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

 

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg