quotations about the mind
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
The mind is a mill which can incessant turn, 'til its mere operation focus the stress inward and the stones grind themselves to dust.
DAVID MAMET
Faustus
As an orchard when manured produces pleasant trees and luscious fruit, so does a cultivated mind produce pure thoughts and noble actions.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
Your unconscious mind is not a sink of horror and depravity. That's a Victorian notion, and a terrifically destructive one. It crippled most of the best minds of the nineteenth century, and hamstrung psychology all through the first half of the twentieth. Don't be afraid of your unconscious mind! It's not a black pit of nightmares. Nothing of the kind! It is the wellspring of health, imagination, creativity. What we call 'evil' is produced by civilization, its constraints and repressions, deforming the spontaneous, free self-expression of the personality. The aim of psychotherapy is precisely this, to remove these groundless fears and nightmares, to bring up what's unconscious into the light of rational consciousness, examine it objectively, and find that there is nothing to fear.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
attributed, Zen and the Work of Wittgenstein
The free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for it is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.
JOHN STEINBECK
East of Eden
Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
In greatest minds' great thoughts earth's passed; betimes
Fatal, foreshape the future.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Universal Hymn
The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
The vivid force of his mind prevailed, and he fared forth far beyond the flaming ramparts of the heavens and traversed the boundless universe in thought and mind.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
The Phenomenology of Spirit
Truly wonderful the mind of a child is.
YODA
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
The mind is the pilot. We think of things before the body does them.
WALT DISNEY
attributed, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation
Babylon in all its desolation is a sight not so awful as that of the human mind in ruins.
SCROPE BERDMORE DAVIES
letter to Thomas Raikes, May, 1835
A mind that is afraid withers away; it cannot function properly.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
On Fear
Only in quiet waters things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.
HANS MARGOLIUS
attributed, A Toolbox for Humanity
Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
The Evolution of Physics
There are minds constructed like the eyes of certain insects, which discern, with admirable distinctness, the most delicate lineaments and finest veins of the leaf which bears them, but are totally unable to take in the ensemble of the plant or shrub. When error has effected an entrance into such minds, it remains there impregnable, because no general view assists them in throwing off the chance impression of the moment.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles", The Writings of Madame Swetchine
If the human mind naturally produces noisome weeds, it also produces flowers and fruit; and ... the best method to mend the soil in general, is for each of us to cultivate his own particular spot.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
The wise may find in trifles light as atoms in the air, some useful lesson to enrich the mind.
JOHN GODFREY SAXE
"King Solomon and the Bees"