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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 is a religious duty and quality of the mind; and exercise of the judgment upon all occasions and subjects is true and most divine worship.

Cora L. V. Scott

Ah! as you say, we should slip over many thoughts and act as though we did not perceive them.

Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné

Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Logic is in the eye of the logician.

Gloria Steinem

Bugfuck; you had to be crazy like Robert E. Howard or H.P. Lovecraft to write like that.

Harlan Ellison

“I am afraid,” said Memnon, “that our little terraqueous globe here is the madhouse of those hundred thousand millions of worlds of which your lordship does me the honor to speak.”

Voltaire

Reason, however able, cool at best,
Cares not for service, or but serves when prest,
Stays till we call, and then not often near.

Alexander Pope

Strong reasons make strong actions.

William Shakespeare King John (1598)

Reason progressive, Instinct is complete;
Swift Instinct leaps; slow reason feebly climbs.
Brutes soon their zenith reach. * * * In ages they no more
Could know, do, covet or enjoy.

Edward Young

While Reason drew the plan, the Heart inform'd
The moral page and Fancy lent it grace.

James Thomson

The kings of modern thought are dumb.

Matthew Arnold

The first thought is often the best.

Joseph Butler

My thoughts ran a wool-gathering.

Miguel de Cervantes

Their own second and sober thoughts.

Matthew Henry Exposition. Job VI. 29; Reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922)

Thoughts so sudden, that they seem
The revelations of a dream.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Strange thoughts beget strange deeds.

Percy Bysshe Shelley The Cenci (1819)

Quick thinkers are not safe ones.

Sophocles

You can fake virtue for an audience. You can’t fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge, they run from it. They spend their lives running.

Ayn Rand The Fountainhead (1943)

I am not going to question your opinions. I am not going to meddle with your belief. I am not going to dictate to you mine. All that I say is, examine; enquire. Look into the nature of things.

Frances Wright A Course of Popular Lectures (1829)

Nobody, I believe, will deny, that we are to form our judgment of the true nature of the human mind, not from sloth and stupidity of the most degenerate and vilest of men, but from the sentiments and fervent desires of the best and wisest of the species.

Robert Leighton

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