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With curious art the brain, too finely wrought,
Preys on herself, and is destroy'd by thought:
Constant attention wears the active mind,
Blots out our powers, and leaves a blank behind.

— Charles Churchill An Epistle to William Hogarth (1763)

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Mind

More quotes by Charles Churchill

Be England what she will,
With all her faults she is my country still.

The Farewell (1764)

Men the most infamous are fond of fame,
And those who fear not guilt yet start at shame.

The Author (1763)

He mouths a sentence as curs mouth a bone.

The Rosciad (1761)

Wherever waves can roll, and winds can blow.

The Farewell (1764)

Not without art, but yet to Nature true.

The Rosciad (1761)

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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: Charles Churchill (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.