Mind Quotes

If you would stand well with a great mind, leave him with a favorable impression of yourself; if with a little mind, leave him with a favorable impression of himself.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Baseball is dull only to dull minds.

Red Barbe

Times of general calamity and confusion create great minds. The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace, and the brightest thunderbolt is elicited from the darkest storms.

Charles Caleb Colton

All my life I have tried to pluck a thistle and plant a flower wherever the flower would grow in thought and mind.

Abraham Lincoln

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at 20 or 80. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

Henry Ford

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

Carl Gustav Jung

Tact is, after all, a kind of mind reading.

Sarah Orne Jewett

Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.

Leonardo da Vinci

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind; the thief doth fear each bush an officer.

William Shakespeare

Take a note of that his Lordship says he will turn it over in what he is pleased to call his mind.

Richard Bethell

All prosperity begins in the mind and is dependent only on the full use of our creative imagination.

Ruth Ross

If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it.

William A. Orton

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Speech is the mirror of the mind. Imago Animi Sermo Est.

Seneca

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

The word liberal distinguishes whatever nourishes the mind and spirit from the training which is merely practical or professional or from the trivialities which are no training at all.

Alan Simpson

When the mind is silent, beyond weakness or non concentration, then it can enter into a world which is far beyond the mind the highest End.

Maitri Upanishads

I hardly know so true a mark of a little mind as the servile imitation of others.

Greville

You have to allow a certain amount of time in which you are doing nothing in order to have things occur to you, to let your mind think.

Mortimer Adle

My dear boy, no woman is a genius. They are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Russians love Brooke Shield because her eyebrows remind them of Leonid Brezhnev.

Robin Williams

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

You can do what you want to do, accomplish what you want to accomplish, attain any reasonable objective you may have in mind - - Not all of a sudden, perhaps not in one swift and sweeping act of achievement - - But you can do it gradually, day by day and play by play, if you want to do it, if you work to do it, over a sufficiently long period of time.

William E. Holle

During these periods of relaxation after concentrated intellectual activity, the intuitive mind seems to take over and can produce the sudden clarifying insights which give so much joy and delight.

Fritjof Capra, physicist

Do not... hope wholly to reason away your troubles do not feed them with attention, and they will die imperceptibly away. Fix your thoughts upon your business, fill your intervals with company, and sunshine will again break in upon your mind.

Samuel Johnson

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The test of a first - Rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Great men of action... never mind on occasion being ridiculous in a sense it is part of their job, and at times they all are. A prophet or an achiever must never mind an occasional absurdity, it is an occupational risk.

Oswald Mosley

Without freedom from the past, there is no freedom at all, because the mind is never new, fresh, innocent.

Krishnamurti

One whose chief regard is for his own mind, and for the divinity within him and the service of its goodness, will strike no poses, utter no complaints, and crave neither for solitude nor yet for a crowd. Best of all, his life will be free from continual pursuing and avoiding.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations? Book Three

Wars begin in the minds of man, and in those minds, love and compassion would have built the defenses of peace.

U Thant

Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind.

Louis Pasteur, 1822 - 1895

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.

Giordano Bruno

Just as treasures are uncovered from the earth, so virtue appears from good deeds, and wisdom appears from a pure and peaceful mind. To walk safely through the maze of human life, one needs the light of wisdom and the guidance of virtue.

Buddha

You must read, you must persevere, you must sit up nights, you must inquire, and exert the utmost power of your mind. If one way does not lead to the desired meaning, take another; if obstacles arise, then still another; until, if your strength holds out, you will find that clear which at first looked dark.

Giovanni Boccaccio, Leitch, Vincent B. ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001.

The mind has greater power over the emotions, and is less subject thereto, insofar as it understands all things to be necessary.

Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics

Everyone should free their mind and soul. Some are ready to free them now, and some will be ready to free them in the future. Some will never be ready and that is what makes their lives not worth living.

Emad Hasan

To be feared is to fear no one has been able to strike terror into others and at the same time enjoy peace of mind.

Seneca