Mind quotes
16.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"I had always been impressed by the fact that there are surprisingly many individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and yet are not stupid, and an equal number who obviously do use their minds but in an amazingly stupid way."
"The Bill of Rights decoupled religion from the state, in part because so many religions were steeped in an absolutist frame of mind - each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on the truth and therefore eager for the state to impose this truth on others."
"The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves - without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster."
"A googolplex is precisely as far from infinity as is the number 1... no matter what number you have in mind, infinity is larger still."
"He that can carp in the most eloquent or acute manner at the weakness of the human mind is held by his fellows as almost divine."
"The mind can only imagine anything, or remember what is past, while the body endures."
"Man can, indeed, act contrarily to the decrees of God, as far as they have been written like laws in the minds of ourselves or the prophets, but against that eternal decree of God, which is written in universal nature, and has regard to the course of nature as a whole, he can do nothing."
"As men's habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to scoff, I conclude ... that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits."
"Power gradually extirpates from the mind every humane and gentle virtue."
"Facts are to the mind what food is to the body."
"Endlessly amused by people's minds."
"When I go out on the field, I just put it in my mind that I'm playing for my family."
"We are more than just flesh and bones. There's a certain spiritual nature and something of the mind that we can't measure. We can't find it. With all our sophisticated equipment, we cannot monitor or define it, and yet it's there."
"Every man should be content to mind his own business."
"Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life."
"Most often, the reason something is "on your mind" is that you want it to be different than it currently is, and yet: you haven't clarified exactly what the intended outcomes is; you haven't decided what the very next physical action step is; and/or you haven't put reminders of the outcome and the action required in a system you trust. That's why it's on your mind."
"First of all, if it's on your mind, your mind isn't clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection bucket, that you know you'll come back to regularly and sort through."
"Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head."
"All morality depends upon our sentiments; and when any action or quality of the mind pleases us after a certain manner we say it is virtuous; and when the neglect or nonperformance of it displeases us after a like manner, we say that we lie under an obligation to perform it."
"Upon the whole, necessity is something, that exists in the mind, not in objects; nor is it possible for us ever to form the most distant idea of it, consider'd as a quality in bodies. Either we have no idea of necessity, or necessity is nothing but that determination of thought to pass from cause to effects and effects to causes, according to their experienc'd union."
