quotations about the mind
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
Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Middlesex
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
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
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
A brilliant mind was never as clever as three average minds sniffing after something of interest.
ROBERT REED
"Precious Mental", Asimov's Science Fiction, June 1, 2013
A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things, but cannot receive great ones.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
The mind is a chaotic place, turbulent on a whim. And each mind is individually unique, and thus uniquely chaotic.
DUALSHOCKERS STAFF
DualShockers, December 12, 2017
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
"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
You must maintain strength of body in order to preserve strength of mind.
LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES
Reflections and Maxims
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
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
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
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
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
The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
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