quotations about the mind
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
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
A mind that is afraid withers away; it cannot function properly.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
On Fear
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
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
The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
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
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
'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
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"
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
How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind!
JANE AUSTEN
Mansfield Park
The mind is the pilot. We think of things before the body does them.
WALT DISNEY
attributed, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation
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
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 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
In greatest minds' great thoughts earth's passed; betimes
Fatal, foreshape the future.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Universal Hymn
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