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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:

When Bishop Berkeley said, "there was no matter,"
And proved it—'twas no matter what he said.

Lord Byron

"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."

Lewis Carroll

Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so, and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence.

Joseph Wood Krutch

I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.

Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

Oh! thou who art greatly mad, deign to spare me who am less mad.

Horace

Go, madman! rush over the wildest Alps, that you may please children and be made the subject of declamation.

Juvenal

Each agent needs to know which of its servants can do what, but as to how, that information has no place or use inside those tiny minds inside our minds.

Marvin Minsky

The nature of mind: much of its power seems to stem from just the messy ways its agents cross-connect. ... It's only what we must expect from evolution's countless tricks.

Marvin Minsky The Society of Mind (1988)

The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play

Theodore Sturgeon

Reason always stands in need of being purified by faith

Pope Benedict XVI

There is a degree of doubt, and caution, and modesty, which, in all kinds of scrutiny and decision, ought for ever to accompany a just reasoner.

David Hume An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

There is a gossipy reasoning which in its endlessness bears about the same relation to the result as the interminable line of Egyptian monarchs bears to the historical value of their reigns.

Søren Kierkegaard Either/Or (1843)

His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff; you shall seek all day ere you find them; and when you have them, they are not worth the search.

William Shakespeare

I have no other but a woman's reason
I think him so because I think him so.

William Shakespeare

To be rational is so glorious a thing, that two-legged creatures generally content themselves with the title.

John Locke

Chi Wen Tzu always thought three times before taking action. When the Master was told of this, he commented, "Twice is quite enough."

Confucius

We must free ourselves from the sacralization of the social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and human relations as thought.

Michel Foucault

My thoughts and I were of another world.

Ben Jonson

Thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers.

John Milton

Large elements in order brought,
And tracts of calm from tempest made,
And world-wide fluctuation sway'd,
In vassal tides that follow'd thought.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson In Memoriam A.H.H (1849)

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