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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:

Without asking anybody’s advice
I turned myself insane.

Suman Pokhrel

It must have required enormous effort for man to overcome his natural tendency to live like the animals in a continual present.

Gerald James Whitrow Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day (1988)

I salute my desires with a bow.,
were it not for them to come and play
mind would be empty just like me.

Suman Pokhrel

I believed all along,
one day
everyone would go mad
just to see me sane.

Suman Pokhrel

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.

Richard Dawkins

For most men (till by losing rendered sager)
Will back their own opinions by a wager.

Lord Byron Beppo (1818)

Vain, very vain, my weary search to find
That bliss which only centers in the mind.

Oliver Goldsmith The Traveller (1764)

When our thoughts are born,
Though they be good and humble, one should mind
How they are reared, or some will go astray
And shame their mother.

Jean Ingelow A Story of Doom (1867)

Step by step, let whatever happens happen. Real change will come when it is brought about, not by your ego, but by reality. Awareness releases reality to change you.

Anthony de Mello Awareness (1992)

Though man a thinking being is defined,
Few use the grand prerogative of mind.
How few think justly of the thinking few!
How many never think, who think they do!

Jane Taylor

I feel no care of coin,
Well-doing is my wealth;
My mind to me an empire is,
While grace affordeth health.

Robert Southwell

For it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be.

Parmenides

Bourgeois morality tries to maintain an illusion of altruism, whereas in all other areas bourgeois thinking has long since assumed a theoretical as well as an economic egocentrism.

Peter Sloterdijk Critique of Cynical Reason (1987)

There is probably an element of malice in the readiness to overestimate people; we are laying up for ourselves the pleasure of later cutting them down to size.

Eric Hoffer

No barriers, no masses of matter, however enormous, can withstand the powers of the mind. The remotest corners yield to them; all things succumb, the very heaven itself is laid open.

Marcus Manilius

Pierce wrote as a logician and James as a humanist.

John Dewey

Logic is one thing and commonsense another.

Elbert Hubbard

Logicians tell us that a system of ideas containing a contradiction can be used to deduce any statement whatsoever, no matter how absurd.

Steven Pinker

Great wits are sure to madness near alli'd.

John Dryden Absalom and Achitophel (1681)

For those whom God to ruin has designed
He fits for fate, and first destroys their mind.

John Dryden

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