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Mechanism there is... and subconscious control for most complicated routine processes, but the mind can hardly be equal to the task of explaining itself to itself.

— Frederick Soddy Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)

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Mind

More quotes by Frederick Soddy

Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it.

The world that is dead vitally and spiritually is not dead physically.

Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)

The path hewn by knowledge through ignorance points two ways in the direction of the absolute unattainable truth. Man has always tended to confound these two classes of the ultimately unknowable.

Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)

There is no life—body, mind or soul...— no birth, growth or even existence, without a continuous supply and expenditure of energy.

Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)

The self-contained organism is not comprehensible, but the combination of an inanimate mechanism and an external will is more intelligible.

Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Friedrich Schiller On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Frederick Soddy (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.