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Mind Quotes

Shakespeare leads the mind page, with David Hume, Eckhart Tolle, Byron and Horace behind him. Russell’s The ABC of Relativity (1925) is the sourced standout, observing that we all tend to think the world must conform to our prejudices.

“What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind” has a messy history, and the notes tell it. It is credited to Thomas Hewitt Key, who is said to have sent it to Punch in the 1860s, but it had apparently been printed earlier in a magazine called The Month, and it has been given to other people too. “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve” is credited to W. Clement Stone and flagged misattributed. So is a line about the human mind progressing in spirals, credited to Madame de Staël.

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Most quoted on mind:

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)

Reason is Life's sole arbiter, the magic Laby'rinth's single clue:
Worlds lie above, beyond its ken; what crosses it can ne'er be true.

Richard Francis Burton The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

Thomas Jefferson Letter to Peter Carr (1787)

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended.

John C. Lilly The Human Biocomputer (1974)

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Alfred North Whitehead An Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

When we affirm that philosophy begins with wonder, we are affirming in effect that sentiment is prior to reason.

Richard Weaver Ideas have Consequences (1948)

We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think – in fact they do so.

Bertrand Russell The ABC of Relativity (1925)

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Bertrand Russell

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfillment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Letters and Social Aims (1876)

That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.

Samuel Johnson Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

W. H. Auden The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

John Locke An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse.

Sigmund Freud New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (1933)

The history of human thought recalls the swinging of a pendulum which takes centuries to swing. After a long period of slumber comes a moment of awakening.

Peter Kropotkin Anarchist Morality (1890)

And yet, as angels in some brighter dreams
Call to the soul when man doth sleep,
So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes,
And into glory peep.

Henry Vaughan Silex Scintillans (1655)

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