MIND QUOTES VI

quotations about the mind

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

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The mind is the attribute of man. When man is born, he comes into existence with only one weapon with him--The reasoning mind.

AYN RAND

The Fountainhead

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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

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Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Middlesex

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I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.

EMIL CIORAN

The Trouble with Being Born

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Few minds wear out; more rust out.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought

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Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.

JOHN ADAMS

attributed, Looking Toward Sunset: From Sources Old and New, Original and Selected

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"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

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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

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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

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A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things, but cannot receive great ones.

ELIZA COOK

Diamond Dust

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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

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A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

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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

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You must maintain strength of body in order to preserve strength of mind.

LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES

Reflections and Maxims


There are tumults of the mind, when, like the great convulsions of Nature, all seems anarchy and returning chaos; yet often, in those moments of vast disturbance, as in the strife of Nature itself, some new principle of order, or some new impulse of conduct, develops itself, and controls, and regulates, and brings to an harmonious consequence, passions and elements which seem only to threaten despair and subversion.

WILLIAM GIBSON

The Difference Engine

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The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.

ST. AUGUSTINE

Confessions

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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

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The greatest business of a man is to improve his mind.

WELLINS CALCOTT

Thoughts Moral and Divine

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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

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