quotations about the mind
What we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity.
DAVID HUME
A Treatise of Human Nature
The mind is free, whate'er afflict the man,
A King's a King, do Fortune what she can.
MICHAEL DRAYTON
The Barrons' Wars
The mind is international and supra-national ... it ought to serve not war and annihilation, but peace and reconciliation.
HERMANN HESSE
letter read at Nobel banquet, December 10, 1946
When I think of myself my mind cannot soar to higher things but is like a bird with broken wings.
TERESA OF AVILA
The Interior Castle
Our mind is but a lump of clay
That Fate, grim potter, holds
On sorrow's wheel that rolls away,
And, as he pleases, moulds.
BHARTRHARI
"On Time the Destroyer"
What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind? To a waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to a barrel full of floating froth and refuse? No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, insecurely hung on leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with dewdrops and dead flies. And at its centre, pondering forever the Problem of Existence, sits motionless the spider-like and uncanny Soul.
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
Trivia
I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.
EMIL CIORAN
The Trouble with Being Born
The mind is a challenge because it works more like a city than a household, with several networked links resonating at different times and with different subgroups of nodes, such that understanding the behavior of individuals or even of smaller groups won't tell the whole story of what's going on. No approach can capture the whole of what goes on over time in a large city like New York or Rio, even if a city is made of small neighborhoods -- and those neighborhoods, of a few individuals. One may capture certain mass events, like rush hour traffic or festivals, parades or open-air concerts, but not the global behavior of the city.
MARCELO GLEISER
"Science And The Mystery Of The Mind", NPR, November 29, 2017
Just as dogs love to chew bones, the mind loves to get its teeth into problems. That's why it does crossword puzzles and builds atom bombs.
ECKHART TOLLE
The Power of Now
My mind changes often ... People who have no mind can easily be steadfast and firm, but when a man is loaded down to the guards with it, as I am, every heavy sea of foreboding or inclination, maybe of indolence, shifts the cargo.
MARK TWAIN
letter to James Redpath, August 8, 1871
It's a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
The Haunted Bookshop
There is an equator that runs just under the nose: all that live below the equator are animals; all that live above it are men.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Middlesex
There are some metaphysical and abstract arguments for the opinion that the mind, the I within, that controls the body, what the Germans call the ego--which is Latin for I--is simple, not complex; that is, one power operating in different ways and doing different things. I am myself inclined to think that the better opinion; but it is not necessary here to go into this question at all, for what we are going to study is not the mind itself, but human nature, that is, the operations of the mind. And there is no doubt that the operations of the mind are complex. There may be, I am inclined to think there is, but one power, which perceives and thinks and feels and wills; but perceiving and thinking and feeling and willing are very different actions, and it is only with the actions that we have to do.
LYMAN ABBOTT
A Study in Human Nature
"I must really improve my Mind," I tell myself, and once more begin to patch and repair that crazy structure. So I toil and toil on at the vain task of edification, though the wind tears off the tiles, the floors give way, the ceilings fall, strange birds build untidy nests in the rafters, and owls hoot and laugh in the tumbling chimneys.
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
Trivia
The greatest business of a man is to improve his mind.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
Persons without minds are like weeds that delight in good earth; they want to be amused by others, all the more because they are dull within.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind!
JANE AUSTEN
Mansfield Park
Mind is the Master power that moulds and makes,
And Man is Mind, and evermore he takes
The tool of Thought, and, shaping what he wills,
Brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills: --
He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass:
Environment is but his looking-glass.
JAMES ALLEN
As a Man Thinketh