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.
If the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle.
Only a madman would claim that there is some thing unreal about reality.
There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold.
It seems that thought itself has a power for which it has never been given credit.
A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.
They are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts.
—Among the other things lunatics make: their own version of truth.
I take it that reasonable human conduct is part of the ordinary course of things.