quotations about the mind
The mind is international and supra-national ... it ought to serve not war and annihilation, but peace and reconciliation.
HERMANN HESSE
letter read at Nobel banquet, December 10, 1946
Our mind is but a lump of clay
That Fate, grim potter, holds
On sorrow's wheel that rolls away,
And, as he pleases, moulds.
BHARTRHARI
"On Time the Destroyer"
I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.
EMIL CIORAN
The Trouble with Being Born
A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things, but cannot receive great ones.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
You must maintain strength of body in order to preserve strength of mind.
LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES
Reflections and Maxims
If the human mind naturally produces noisome weeds, it also produces flowers and fruit; and ... the best method to mend the soil in general, is for each of us to cultivate his own particular spot.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
Empires will fall--dynasties fade away; but the mind of man will survive the destruction of all inanimate matter--its destiny is eternal.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The vivid force of his mind prevailed, and he fared forth far beyond the flaming ramparts of the heavens and traversed the boundless universe in thought and mind.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.
JOHN ADAMS
attributed, Looking Toward Sunset: From Sources Old and New, Original and Selected
Few minds wear out; more rust out.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Your unconscious mind is not a sink of horror and depravity. That's a Victorian notion, and a terrifically destructive one. It crippled most of the best minds of the nineteenth century, and hamstrung psychology all through the first half of the twentieth. Don't be afraid of your unconscious mind! It's not a black pit of nightmares. Nothing of the kind! It is the wellspring of health, imagination, creativity. What we call 'evil' is produced by civilization, its constraints and repressions, deforming the spontaneous, free self-expression of the personality. The aim of psychotherapy is precisely this, to remove these groundless fears and nightmares, to bring up what's unconscious into the light of rational consciousness, examine it objectively, and find that there is nothing to fear.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
The mind is a chaotic place, turbulent on a whim. And each mind is individually unique, and thus uniquely chaotic.
DUALSHOCKERS STAFF
DualShockers, December 12, 2017
A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
It is the mind that maketh good or ill,
That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.
EDMUND SPENSER
The Faerie Queene
My mind changes often ... People who have no mind can easily be steadfast and firm, but when a man is loaded down to the guards with it, as I am, every heavy sea of foreboding or inclination, maybe of indolence, shifts the cargo.
MARK TWAIN
letter to James Redpath, August 8, 1871
The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
There are some metaphysical and abstract arguments for the opinion that the mind, the I within, that controls the body, what the Germans call the ego--which is Latin for I--is simple, not complex; that is, one power operating in different ways and doing different things. I am myself inclined to think that the better opinion; but it is not necessary here to go into this question at all, for what we are going to study is not the mind itself, but human nature, that is, the operations of the mind. And there is no doubt that the operations of the mind are complex. There may be, I am inclined to think there is, but one power, which perceives and thinks and feels and wills; but perceiving and thinking and feeling and willing are very different actions, and it is only with the actions that we have to do.
LYMAN ABBOTT
A Study in Human Nature
Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
The wise may find in trifles light as atoms in the air, some useful lesson to enrich the mind.
JOHN GODFREY SAXE
"King Solomon and the Bees"
The greatest business of a man is to improve his mind.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine