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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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The waking consciousness, dear friends, is not the ego. The ego is only that portion of the waking consciousness that deals with physical manipulation.

Jane Roberts The Seth Material (1970)

An opinion, right or wrong, can never constitute a moral offense, nor be in itself a moral obligation. It may be mistaken; it may involve an absurdity, or a contradiction. It is a truth; or it is an error: it can never be a crime or a virtue.

Frances Wright A Few Days in Athens (1822)

Reason is a historian, but the passions are actors.

Antoine de Rivarol

Whom Jupiter would destroy he first drives mad.

Sophocles

Who can think wise or stupid things at all that were not thought already in the past.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There lives a race which otherwise does think.

Friedrich Schiller

When a thought is too weak to be expressed simply, it is a proof that it should be rejected.

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues

The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness.

Eckhart Tolle A New Earth (2005)

True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions.

Cicero

If you are trapped in a nightmare you will probably be more strongly motivated to awaken than someone who is just caught in the ups and downs of an ordinary dream.

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1997)

It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better.

Henri Poincaré Science and Method (1908)

If there is anything in the world that can really be called a man’s property, it is surely that which is the result of his mental activity.

Arthur Schopenhauer Unverified attribution noted in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1993)

Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859)

Peace rules the day, where reason rules the mind.

William Collins

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

G. K. Chesterton Quentin Lauer (1992)

The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians—and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.

H. L. Mencken

In Hollywood if you don't have a shrink, people think you're crazy.

Johnny Carson

The mind holds tightly to its secrets not from stinginess or shame, but simply because it does not know them.

Marvin Minsky

If you think about it, the inside of your own mind is the only thing you can be sure of.

Thomas Nagel What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy (1987)

The marvelous collection of forces which appear to control matter, if not actually to constitute it, are and must be mind products.

Alfred Russel Wallace Arne Wyller in Planetary Mind (1995)

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