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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:

REASON, v.i. To weight probabilities in the scales of desire.

Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

We love without reason, and without reason we hate.

Jean-François Regnard

There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.

G. K. Chesterton Orthodoxy (1908)

THERE is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality.

David Hume An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are ultimately answered; and the diffusion of knowledge, so astonishing in the last half-century, has rendered innumerable minds, variously gifted by nature, competent to be competitors or fellow-workers on the theatre of intellectual operation.

Daniel Webster Address on Laying the Cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument (1825)

The ego is not master in its own house.

Sigmund Freud A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis (1917)

Mind, for anything perception can compass, goes therefore in our spatial world more ghostly than a ghost. Invisible, intangible, it is a thing not even of outline; it is not a 'thing'. It remains without sensual confirmation, and remains without it for ever.

Charles Scott Sherrington Man on his Nature (1940)

What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking — there's the real danger.

Frank Herbert God Emperor of Dune (1981)

All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.

Woody Allen his movie Love and Death cited in: Philip Nicholas Johnson-Laird (2006)

Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.

Ludwig Wittgenstein Bertrand Russell, C. K. Ogden (2010)

You will never run mad, niece;
No, not till a hot January.

William Shakespeare

Meditation quiets the lower mind, ever engaged in thinking about external objects, and when the lower mind is tranquil then only can it be illuminated by the Spirit.

Annie Besant

He, therefore, who fixes a limit of any kind to his intellectual attainments dwarfs himself, and cramps the growth of that mind given to us by the Creator, and capable of indefinite expansion.

William H. Crogman The Importance of Correct Ideals (1892)

Measure your mind's height by the shade it casts.

Robert Browning

Heavens! what thick darkness pervades the minds of men.

Ovid

A man of hope and forward-looking mind.

William Wordsworth The Excursion (1814)

It is not often that an opinion is worth expressing, which cannot take care of itself.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Reason is the glory of human nature, and one of the chief eminences whereby we are raised above our fellow-creatures, the brutes, in this lower world.

Isaac Watts Logic: or The Right Use of Reason in the Inquiry after Truth (1724)

The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have, and therefore should be secured, because they seldom return again.

John Locke

A thought often makes us hotter than a fire.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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