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.
Second thoughts oftentimes are the very worst of all thoughts.
To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.
Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.
—What was I thinking earlier about lunatics making their own version of truth? Why specify lunatics?
There has never been any great genius without a spice of madness.
What is more insane than to vent on senseless things the anger that is felt towards men?
The diseases of the mind are more and more destructive than those of the body.
In a disturbed mind, as in a body in the same state, health can not exist.
A well-prepared mind hopes in adversity and fears in prosperity.
A mind that is charmed by false appearances refuses better things.