As that the walls worn thin, permit the mind
To look out through, and his Frailty find.
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.
And bear unmov'd the wrongs of base mankind,
The last, and hardest, conquest of the mind.
'Tis but a base, ignoble mind
That mounts no higher than a bird can soar.
Some praise at morning what they blame at night,
But always think the last opinion right.
Opinion's but a fool, that makes us scan
The outward habit by the inward man.
But since the affairs of men rest still incertain,
Let's reason with the worst that may befall.
The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.
Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world, alters the world.
His high-erected thoughts look'd down upon
The smiling valley of his fruitful heart.
He appears mad indeed but to a few, because the majority is infected with the same disease.
A mind, once formed, is never suited after,
One yet in growth will ever grateful be.
The brain is the citadel of the senses: this guides the principle of thought.
He adopts the opinion of others like a monk in the Sorbonne.