quotations about the mind
The mind grows by what it feeds on.
JOSIAH GILBERT HOLLAND
Lessons in Life
Seek first the virtues of the mind; and other things either will come, or will not be wanted.
FRANCIS BACON
The Advancement of Learning
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays
A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
UNITED NEGRO COLLEGE FUND
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Mind is the master-power that moulds and makes.
JAMES ALLEN
Morning and Evening Thoughts
Those who exert the first influence upon the mind, have the greatest power.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
The mind ain't nothing without the old body tagging along to follow things through.
SAM SHEPARD
La Turista
The mind of man is a scene of perpetual instability and commotion, ruffled by every breeze of passion and agitated by every impulse of hope; it floats with giddy security on the ebullitions of fancy, and sinks with precipitation in the cavities of despair; it pursues with avidity the emotions of sense, and listens with rapture to the murmurs of restraint; it hears with pious reverence the counsels of reason, and follows with lucid submission the dictates of pleasure: always fickle and undetermined, it looks for quiet, sometimes in remonstrance, sometimes in acquiescence; it often mixes with confusion, that it may establish peace, and often regulates quietude by turbulent uproar.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
So have they sought to make men's minds too uniform and harmonical, by not breaking them sufficiently to contrary motions; the reasons whereof I suppose to be, because they themselves were men dedicated to a private, free, and unapplied course of life. For as we see, upon the lute or like instrument, a ground, though it be sweet and have show of many changes, yet breaketh not the hand to such strange and hard stops and passages, as a set song or voluntary; much after the same manner was the diversity between a philosophical and civil life. And, therefore, men are to imitate the wisdom of jewellers: who, if there be a grain, or a cloud, or an ice which may be ground forth without taking too much of the stone, they help it; but if it should lessen and abate the stone too much, they will not meddle with it: so ought men so to procure serenity as they destroy not magnanimity.
FRANCIS BACON
The Advancement of Learning
Dispositions of the mind, like limbs of the body, acquire strength by exercise.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Robert Skipwith, August 3, 1771
The monsters of the mind are far worse than those that actually exist. Fear, doubt, and hate have hamstrung more people than beasts ever have.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Brisingr
There are quiet places also in the mind.... But we build bandstand and factories on them. Deliberately--to put a stop to the quietness.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Antic Hay
My mind is a bad neighborhood that I try not to go into alone.
ANNE LAMOTT
Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
ROBERTSON DAVIES
attributed, The Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotes
People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.
STEVE JOBS
Playboy, February 1985
The unconscious mind writes poetry if it's left alone.
STEPHEN KING
Duma Key
The mind is fast emancipating itself from the dominion of man and of matter. It has let loose fearful forces on the world.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven.
JOHN MILTON
Paradise Lost
There never can be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Pebble in the Sky
To know psychology ... is no guarantee that we shall manage our minds rightly.
WILLIAM GLOVER
Know Your Own Mind