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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:

An ethic isn’t a fact you can look up. It’s a way of thinking.

Theodore Sturgeon More Than Human (1953)

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one’s thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

Wallace Stevens

A sincere acquiescence in the dispensations of Providence will check discomposure of mind beyond any thing. It will produce a calm in the midst of a storm.

Edward Jenner The Life of Edward Jenner M.D. Vol. 2 (1838)

Typing is no substitute for thinking.

Richard Hamming

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.

Walter Benjamin Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

As towards most other things of which we have but little personal experience (foreigners, or socialists, or aristocrats, as the case may be), there is a degree of vague ill-will towards what is called Thinking.

Vernon Lee

Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus.

Alexander Graham Bell Bell Telephone Talk (1901)

Is there a place
here for the spirit? Is there time
on this brief platform for anything
other than mind's failure to explain itself?

R. S. Thomas Frequencies (1978)

Freud … showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty.

Lionel Trilling Beyond Culture (1965)

Before this there was one heart
but a thousand thoughts
Now all is reduced to
"There is no God but God."

Fakhruddin 'Iraqi

A bad feeling is a commotion of the mind repugnant to reason, and against nature.

Zeno of Citium

No mind, no form, I only exist; now ceased all will and thought; the final end of [Nature]]'s dance, I am it whom I have sought.

Sri Chinmoy My Flute (1972)

Mathematicians have tried in vain to this day to discover some order in the sequence of prime numbers, and we have reason to believe that it is a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate.

Leonhard Euler Calculus Gems (1992)

I can remain thoughtfully thoughtless. It is not an empty mind.

B. K. S. Iyengar

To hold the pure delights of brain
Above light loves and sweet champagne.
For, you and I, we did eschew
The egoistic "I" and "you."

Amy Levy A London Plane-tree, and Other Verse (1889)

A good stance and posture reflect a proper state of mind.

Morihei Ueshiba Budo (1938)

The mind of man may be compared to a musical instrument with a certain range of notes, beyond which in both directions we have an infinitude of silence.

John Tyndall Fragments of Science, Vol. II (1879)

Yoga is the cessation of movements of the mind. Then there is abiding in the seer's own form.

Patañjali

Remember the mind is your best muscle ...BIG ARMS can move rocks, but BIG WORDS can move mountains... Ride the brain train for success....

Sylvester Stallone

The light of love, the purity of grace,
The mind, the music breathing from her face, 19
The heart whose softness harmonized the whole,—
And oh, that eye was in itself a soul!

Lord Byron The Bride of Abydos (1813)

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