quotations about the mind
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
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
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 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
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"
It is the mind that maketh good or ill,
That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.
EDMUND SPENSER
The Faerie Queene
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
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
A mind that is afraid withers away; it cannot function properly.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
On Fear
'Tis the mind must guide the hand.
MAUD LINDSAY
"The Giant Energy & the Fairy Skill", Mother Stories
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
Truly wonderful the mind of a child is.
YODA
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind!
JANE AUSTEN
Mansfield Park
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
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
The mind is the pilot. We think of things before the body does them.
WALT DISNEY
attributed, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation
It is not that science is unable to ever figure out the mind, or that the problem of understanding the mind is that we can't step out of it. The problem is that this kind of approach, focused on local cause and effect mechanics within the brain, on neurons firing across their synaptic connections, is doomed to fail.
MARCELO GLEISER
"Science And The Mystery Of The Mind", NPR, November 29, 2017
In greatest minds' great thoughts earth's passed; betimes
Fatal, foreshape the future.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Universal Hymn
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
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