Quotes about mind
page 56

“Threaten the balances of justice and you threaten the potential enlargements of mind and soul. Therefore justice is part of the safeguarding of the heart.”

B. W. Powe (1955) Canadian writer

Emanations, Destinies, p. 61
Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose (2007)

Justice, Soul, Heart, Parting

“It seemed to him that the Order of St Clement labored under the curse of mediocrity, and had done so almost from the beginning. In Europe, the Clementines hadn't (it was always said) recovered from the French Revolution. It was certain that they hadn't ever really got going in the New World. Their history revealed little to brag about-one saint (the Holy Founder) and a few bishops of missionary sees, no theologians worthy of the name, no original thinkers, not even a scientist. The Clementines were unique in that they were noted for nothing at all. They were in bad shape all over the world. The Chicago province was probably better off than the others, but that wasn't saying much. Their college was failing, their high schools were a breakeven proposition at best, and their parishes, except for a few, were in unsettled parts of Texas and New Mexico where no order in its right mind would go. The latest white elephant was an abandoned sanitarium in rural Minnesota! But that was typical of Father Boniface and the rest of them. They just didn't know a bad thing when they saw it-or a good one.”

J. F. Powers (1917–1999) American writer

Morte d’Urban (1962)

World, School, History, Parting

“Fashionable women regard themselves, and are regarded by men, as pretty toys or as mere instruments of pleasure; and the vacuity of mind, the heartlessness, the frivolity which is the necessary result of this false and debasing estimate of women, can only be fully understood by those who have mingled in the folly and wickedness of fashionable life.”

Sarah Grimké (1792–1873) American abolitionist

Letter 8 (1837).
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837)

Life, Women, Men, Pleasure

“[It] would have been all the easier [if] the entire story of the scar had been presented as a recollection which awakens in Odysseus’ mind at this particular moment. It would have been perfectly easy to do; the story of the scar had only to be inserted two verses earlier, at the first mention of the word scar, where the motifs “Odysseus” and “recollection” were already at hand. But any such subjectivistic‐perspectivistic procedure, creating a foreground and background, resulting in the present lying open to the depths of the past, is entirely foreign to the Homeric style; the Homeric style knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present.”

Erich Auerbach Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Source: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), p. 7

Lying, Past

“A problem has arisen. Although I handed in my army rations to the cook, with the intention of living on these, nobody has taken me seriously, nor believed that any human being in his right mind and able to eat pasta would refrain from doing so.”

Norman Lewis book Naples '44

Naples '44

Problem, Cooking

“Trust arises from the mind's instinctive feeling after fixed realities, after the substance of every shadow, the base of all appearance, the everlasting amid change.”

James Martineau (1805–1900) English religious philosopher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 602.

Feeling, Reality, Appearance, Change

“A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millenium (1997), Chapter 14, "The Common Enemy".

Understanding, Freedom, Science

“They’re too literal-minded,” he said quietly. “All doing, no innovative thinking. They don’t understand metaphors well; half of them think you’re Baba Yaga returned, you know? We’ve been a, ah, stable culture too long. Patterns of belief, attitudes, get ingrained. When change comes, they are incapable of responding. Try to fit everything into their preconceived dogmas.”

Charles Stross book Singularity Sky

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 12, “Bouncers” (p. 253)

Understanding, Thinking, Change

“Indeed. there is a whole section in the Old Testament which does not square with its dominant ideas. The Proverbs, to my mind the best part of the Bible, represents a non-Mosaic tradition. In its spirit, it is very different from the Pentateuch and the Prophets; its ethics is high; it represents a very different spiritual tradition, the tradition of Self-knowledge. Its teaching is mostly, anonymous; it has also a woman teacher… rather an exception in the Bible…”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Hindu View of Christianity and Islam (1992)

Idea, Knowledge, Teachers, Parting

“The political Liberty of a Citizen is the Peace of Mind arising from the Consciousness, that every Individual enjoys his peculiar Safety; and in order that the People might attain this Liberty, the Laws ought to be so framed, that no one Citizen should stand in Fear of another; but that all of them should stand in Fear of the same Laws….”

Catherine the Great (1729–1796) Empress of Russia

Proposals for a New Law Code (1768)

People, Fear, Peace, Law

“The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Friday

“She thought of the multitude.
Trillions of human beings, wrappend like a fog about their home star. The mind collapsed at the scale and the numbers. But if ethics meant anything at all, it meant not letting the largeness of the human population overwhelm our moral knowledge that life is lived individually, and that even when agglomerated into billions and trillions individual human beings deserve better han being used as tools. That the overwhelming majority of this vast mass of humanity was poor, living precariously and subsistence lives in leaky shanty bubbles, eating ghunk and drinking recycled water—this made this more, not less, true. These were the people least able to help themselves. Thery should be helped, not exploited.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 2, Chapter 13, “Of Multitudes” (p. 239).
Jack Glass (2012)

Life, People, Home, Star

“It may be relevant here to recall gratefully a fraternal correction I was kindly offered by the Archimandrite Ambrosius of the Greek Orthodox Church. After listening to a lecture I delivered at Oxford University some years ago, he gently chided me (in private, not in public) for not perceiving the difference between the brand of Hellenism affecting Western theology that had absorbed the philosophical thought of ancient Greece, and the Hellenism of Eastern Orthodox theology which had assimilated the spiritual praxis of their non-Christian ancestors. Mulling over this critical observation of his, I came to understand why our scholastic tradition has not given importance to what Greek Orthodox spirituality has named nepsis (vigilance), which is its own technical term for mindfulness.”

Aloysius Pieris (1934) Sri Lankan Jesuit priest

Source: "Spirituality as Mindfulness: Biblical and Buddhist Approaches", p. 39

Understanding, Universe

“In relations with others, one should express resentment and anger openly and straightforwardly. If one cannot express them openly and straightforwardly, the only thing to do is forget about them. To harbor grievances in one's heart, awaiting some later opportunity to give vent to them, is to act like a weak and petty man-in truth, it can only be called cowardice. The mind of the superior man is like Heaven. When it is resentful or angry, it thunders forth its indignation. But once having loosed its feelings, it is like a sunny day with a clear sky: within the heart there remains not the trace of a cloud. Such is the beauty of true manliness.”

Yoshida Shoin (1830–1859) Japanese politician

Vol. III.
Yoshida Shoin Zenshu

Truth, Beauty, Feeling, Heart

“Her haughtiness and habit of domination was, therefore, a fictitious character, induced over that which was natural to her, and it deserted her when her eyes were opened to the extent of her own danger, as well as that of her lover and her guardian; and when she found her will, the slightest expression of which was wont to command respect and attention, now placed in opposition to that of a man of a strong, fierce, and determined mind, who possessed the advantage over her, and was resolved to use it, she quailed before him.”

Walter Scott book Ivanhoe

Source: Ivanhoe (1819), Ch. 23.

Lovers, Nature, Strong

“Body work must be approached with the same respect and attentiveness that one gives to dreams. The body has a wisdom of its own. However slowly and circuitously that wisdom manifests, once it is experienced it is a foundation, a basis of knowing that gives confidence and total support to the ego. To reach its wisdom requires absolute concentration: dropping the mind into the body, breathing into whatever is ready to be released, and allowing the process of expression until the negative, dammed energy is out, making room for the positive energy, genuine Light, to flood in.”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: The Pregnant Virgin (1985), p. 60

Wisdom, Dreams, Confidence, Support

“Unchecked, the tourist will climb over the fence and come right into your house to take pictures of you in your habitat. Cities mindful of tourists have built elaborate “tourist traps” which, luckily, work. Tourists are kept confined to these, and few escape. There is, of course, the type known as the “intrepid tourist.” This one has to be watched carefully or he can become most annoying. Little wonder these are so often the target of terrorists. If there is an aspect of benign terror about the tourist, there is also a great deal of tourist in the terrorist. Terrorists travel with only one thing in mind, just like the tourist, and the specifics of places escape them both. Terrorists travel for the purpose of shooting unsuspecting foreigners, just as tourists travel for the purpose of shooting them with a camera.”

Andrei Codrescu (1946) American writer

“The Tourist,” Raised by Puppets (1990).

Travel, Housing

“Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.”

Mary Wollstonecraft book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Source: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Ch. 3

Beauty

“Oh, she takes care of herself
She can wait if she wants
She's ahead of her time
Oh, and she never gives out
And she never gives in
She just changes her mind.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

She's Always a Woman.
Song lyrics, The Stranger (1977)

Change, Time, Waiting

“There is nothing an official hates more than a person who makes up his own mind.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy (2006)

Hate, Personality

“The pretext for indecisiveness is commonly mature deliberation; but in reality indecisive men occupy themselves less in deliberation than others; for to him who fears to decide, deliberation (which has a foretaste of that fear) soon becomes intolerably irksome, and the mind escapes from the anxiety of it into alien themes.”

Henry Taylor (1800–1886) English playwright and poet

Source: The Statesman (1836), Ch. 21. p. 144

Men, Fear, Reality, Indecision

“I don't mind being called a liberal. I just don't really think it's true.”

Howard Dean (1948) American political activist

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11710-2003Jul5?language=printer

Thinking

“One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories.”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

Aphorism 52
Les Caractères (1688), Des jugements

“On the diamond, I had been rough on Babe. I'd never taken my spurs out of his hide and one day he'd come looking for me in the Detroit clubhouse with fistic mayhem in mind. We'd won and lost duels to each other way back since 1915, when Babe had been a rookie pitcher with Bill Carrigan's Boston Red Sox. To add heat to the situation, some press association or other was always holding a poll to pick between Ruth and Cobb as the all-time star player.”

Ty Cobb (1886–1961) American baseball player

On Babe Ruth, in Ch. 16 : The Babe and I, p. 214
My Life In Baseball : The True Record (1961)

Way, Star, Time

“Should they answer that, if impunity were assured, they would do what was most to their selfish interest, that would be a confession that they were criminally minded; should they say that they would not do so, they would be granting that all things in and of themselves immoral should be avoided.”
Si responderint se impunitate proposita facturos, quod expediat, facinorosos se esse fateantur, si negent, omnia turpia per se ipsa fugienda esse concedant.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Book III, section 39; translated by Walter Miller
De Officiis – On Duties (44 BC)

Selfishness

“Besides the want of arrangement in the original [work of Marcus Aurelius] and of connection among the numerous paragraphs, the corruption of the text, the obscurity of the language and the style, and sometimes perhaps the confusion in the writer's own ideas - besides all this there is occasionally an apparent contradiction in the emperor's thoughts, as if his principles were sometimes unsettled, as if doubt sometimes clouded his mind.”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

The Philosophy of Antoninus

Idea

“Democrats of the seventies and eighties are too tolerant, too open-minded, not feral enough. I want to be a ferocious liberal.”

Alec Baldwin (1954) American actor, writer, producer, and comedian

As quoted in "Smart Alec" by Alec Gross, in New York magazine, Vol. 30, No. 35 (24 November 1997), p. 41.

“To be independent to my mind does not mean to be isolated, to be the priest or the Levite, but rather to be the good Samaritan. There is no real independence save only as we secure it through the law of service.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Ordered Liberty and World Peace (1924)

Law

“Mahmood Shah’s next effort was against the port of Jugut, with a view of making converts of the infidels, an object from which he had been hitherto deterred by the reports he received of the approaches to it…”“The King, after an arduous march, at length arrived before the fort of Jugut a place filled with infidels, misled by the infernal minded bramins… The army was employed in destroying the temple at Jugut, and in building a mosque in its stead; while measures, which occupied three or four months in completing, were in progress for equipping a fleet to attack the island of Bete…”

Firishta (1560–1620) Indian historian

Sultãn Mahmûd BegDhã of Gujarat (AD 1458-1511) Dwarka (Gujarat)
Tãrîkh-i-Firishta

Effort

“When you're with somebody for a long time or have a child with someone, you start to expect them to be this person you had in mind. Then if they don't fill the expectation, resentment starts to come up.”

Jaime Pressly (1977) American actress, model, producer

Jaime Pressly Opens Up About Her Divorce And Memoir

Time, Personality

“In the postmodern tradition, the pseudo-academics behind the concept of white privilege have invented for themselves an artificial, political construct. Political constructs confer power on those who dream them up. For politics is the predatory process through which the figment of sick minds is weaponized.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"The Demonization Of Whites By Mrs. Bill Gates & Other Dangerous Idiots," https://constitution.com/the-demonization-of-whites-by-mrs-bill-gates-other-dangerous-idiots/ Constitution.com, June 8, 2018 2010s, 2018

Dreams

“Not only have we radically abandoned the motive fully developed according to its determined and, therefore, artificial equilibrium, but we suddenly and purposely intersect each motif with one or more other motifs of which we never give the full development but merely the initial, central, of final notes... We thus arrived at what we call the painting of states of mind.”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

Source: 1912, Les exposants au public', 1912, p. 8.

Motivation, Painting

“Theological arguments are supposed to provide ‘explanations’ for the existence of God. That means these arguments ought to persuade and make anyone who does not know about God to at least understand that God exists. But unfortunately, this is not the case. Anyone who takes a critical look at the theological arguments would really wonder what those who advanced these explanations had in mind.”

Leo Igwe (1970) Nigerian human rights activist

An Interview with Dr. Leo Igwe — Founder, Nigerian Humanist Movement (2017)

God, Understanding

“To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realised as being true, that is called propaganda. In the beginning there is the understanding, this understanding uses propaganda as a tool to find those men, that shall turn understanding into politics. Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things from what I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. Those are found in other circumstances, I find them when thinking at my desk, but not in the meeting hall.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Speech on 9 January 1928 to an audience of party members at the "Hochschule für Politik", a series of training talks for Nazi party members in Berlin
1920s

Love, Women, Men, People

“It is true that many scientists are not philosophically minded and have hitherto shown much skill and ingenuity but little wisdom.”

Max Born (1882–1970) physicist

Source: Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance (1964), p. 2

Wisdom

“Success can come to you by courageous Devotion to the task lying in front of you I can assert with out fear of contradiction that quality of the Indian mind is equal to the quality of any Teutonic, Nordic, or Anglo-Saxon mind. What we lack is perhaps courage, what we lack is driving force which takes one any where. We have I think, developed an inferiority complex. I think what is needed in India today is the destruction of that defeatist spirit.”

C. V. Raman (1888–1970) Indian physicist

This is from his address to the young graduates in 1969 quoted in [Kalam, A P J Abdul, Ignited Minds: Unleashing The Power Within India, http://books.google.com/books?id=_PdboDsin90C&pg=PA28, 1 September 2010, Pearson Education India, 978-81-317-2960-1, 28–29]

Fear, Lying, Courage, Thinking

“I would love to change your mind”

Pete Yorn (1974) American musician

Song lyrics

Love, Change

“In his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), H. G. Wells pointed out that ever since the beginning of life, most creatures have been 'up against it'. Their lives are a drama of struggle against the forces of nature. Yet nowadays you can say to a man: Yes, you earn a living, you support a family, you love and hate, but -- what do you do? His real interest may be in something else -- art, science, literature, philosophy. The bird is a creature of the air, the fish is a creature of the water, and man is a creature of the mind.”

Colin Wilson book From Atlantis to the Sphinx

Source: From Atlantis to the Sphinx (1996), p. 346-347

Love, Life, Hate, Family

“I find that it is very useful to look over the location and to feel out the atmosphere while waiting for the actors. It may happen that the images before my eyes coincide with those I had in my mind, but this is not frequently the case. It more often happens that there is something insincere or artificial about the image one has thought of. Here again is another way of improvising.”

Michelangelo Antonioni (1912–2007) Italian film director and screenwriter

Cahiers du Cinema (1960)

Way, Feeling, Waiting

“At first I intended to carry on working in Saint-Prex [in Switzerland, circa 1914 – 1915] in the same way I had been working in Munich [the location of his Blaue Reiter / Blue Rider period]. But something inside me prevented me from painting colourful, sensuous pictures. Suffering had changed my soul, telling me to find other forms and colours to express what was on my mind.”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

from: 'Köpfe, Gesichte, Meditationen', Clemens Weiler
Source: 1936 - 1941, Life Memories' (1938), p. 149

Way, Soul, Suffering, Change

“We lived one year in a suburb so new it was still being built in fields of red clay: a neat grid of streets named after songbirds was being dropped like a lattice of dough over a pie. Up and down Robin and Tanager and Bluebird I raced my bike; in a storm I pedaled so fast I hoped to catch up with the wind-driven rain. As I sped into the riddling wet warmth I shook my right hand according to a magical formula of my own. The universe, signaled by its master, groaned, revolved, released a flash of lightning. At last the imagination, like a mold on an orange, was covering the globe of my mind.”

Edmund White book A Boy's Own Story

Source: A Boy's Own Story (1982), Chapter Three (p. 81).

Hope, Imagination, Universe

“Logic aims to instruct the human mind as to its own nature and processes; it will lay bare the interior working of our mind for our guidance. The object of the study of logic is thought, its nature, and its proper classification.”

Joseph Dietzgen (1828–1888) german philosopher

Letter 2
Letters on Logic: Especially Democratic-Proletarian Logic (1906)

Nature, Study

“I think of the company advertising "Thought Processors" or the college pretending that learning BASIC suffices or at least helps, whereas the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (1984) Source: The threats to computing science http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD898.html (EWD898). 1980s

Thinking, Learning, Help

“Freedom became one of the beacon lights of my life and it has remained so ever since. Freedom with the passing of years transcended the mere freedom of my country and embraced freedom of man everywhere and from every sort of trammel—above all, it meant freedom of the human personality, freedom of the mind, freedom of the spirit. This freedom has become the passion of my life and I shall not see it compromised for bread, for security, for prosperity, for the glory of the state or for anything else.”

Jayaprakash Narayan

Jayaprakash Narayan, (said at the height of the Emergency when Indira Gandhi stated that ‘food is more important than freedom’), quoted in L.K. Advani, My Country My Life (2008), also quoted at http://www.thestatesman.com/opinion/celebrating-a-legacy-96135.html Quotes by JP

Life, Freedom, Light, Passion

“It is often said, mainly by the 'no-contests', that although there is no positive evidence for the existence of God, nor is there evidence against his existence. So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

From speech at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, . Frequently misattributed to The God Delusion.
quoted in [EDITORIAL: A scientist's case against God, The Independent (London), April 20, 1992, 17] and [2011-05-27, What Should I Believe?: Philosophical Essays for Critical Thinking, Paul Gomberg, Broadview Press, 9781554810130, 146, http://books.google.com/books?id=76WxxHN9I0kC&pg=PA146&dq=%22Faith+is+the+great+cop-out%22]

God, Sense, Christmas

“Always have a book at hand, in the parlor, on the table, for the family; a book of condensed thought and striking anecdote, of sound maxims and truthful apothegms. It will impress on your own mind a thousand valuable suggestions, and teach your children a thousand lessons of truth and duty. Such a book is a casket of jewels for your household.”

Tryon Edwards (1809–1894) American theologian

Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 464.

Children, Truth, Books, Family

“No man loves God who hates his kind,
Who tramples on his brother's heart and soul;
Who seeks to shackle, cloud, or fog the mind
By fears of hell has not perceived our goal.

God-sent are all religions blest;
And Christ, the Way, the Truth, the Life,
To give the heavy laden rest
And peace from sorrow, sin, and strife.

Behold the Universal Spirit came
To all the churches, not to one alone;
On Pentecostal morn a tongue of flame
Round each apostle as a halo shone.

Since then, as vultures ravenous with greed,
We oft have battled for an empty name,
And sought by dogma, edict, cult, or creed,
To send each other to the quenchless flame.

Is Christ then twain? Was Cephas, Paul,
To save the world, nailed to the tree?
Then why divisions here at all?
Christ's love enfolds both you and me.

His pure sweet love is not confined
By creed which segregate and raise a wall.
His love enfolds, embraces human kind,
No matter what ourselves or Him we call.

Then why not take Him at His word?
Why hold to creeds which tear apart?
But one thing matters, be it heard
That brother love fill every heart.

There's but one thing the world has need to know.
There's but one balm for all our human woe:

There's but one way that leads to heaven above--
That way is human sympathy and love.”

Max Heindel (1865–1919) American asrologer and occultist

Creed or Christ (1909) Source: http://www.rosicrucian.com/rcc/rcceng00.htm http://www.rosicrucian.com/rcc/rcceng00.htm

Love, Life, God, Hate

“She had long ago accepted the fact that, when it came to the affectations with which radical feminists liked to impoverish their minds—crystal therapy, neo-paganism, Wicca—her skepticism placed her emphatically in a minority.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 4, “Dirge” (p. 72)

“By science I mean an assemblage of transcendental propositions discoverable by human reason, and reducible to first principles, axioms, or maxims, from which they may all be derived in a regular succession; and there are consequently as many sciences as there are general objects of our intellectual powers: when man first exerts those powers, his objects are himself and the rest of nature; himself he perceives to be composed of body and mind… and in the leisure… his intellect is directed to nature at large, to the substance of natural bodies, to their several properties, and to their quantity… and… arrives at the demonstration of a first intelligent cause; whence his collected wisdom, being arranged in the form of science, chiefly consists of physiology and medicine, metaphysicks and logick, ethicks and jurisprudence, natural philosophy and mathematicks; from which the religion of nature (since revealed religion must be referred to history, as alone affording evidence of it) has in all ages and in all nations been the sublime and consoling result.”

William Jones (1746–1794) Anglo-Welsh philologist and scholar of ancient India

p, 125
"On the Philosophy of the Asiatics" (1794)

Wisdom, Age, Religion, History

“What is perceived is dictated by the instrument. If you had other eyes, or another mind, you would see all things otherwise.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Source: Fiction, The Book of the New Sun (1980–1983), The Urth of the New Sun (1987), Chapter 40, "The Brook Beyond Briah" (p. 285)

“The human mind is never better disposed to gratitude and attachment than when softened by fear.”

Charles James Napier (1782–1853) Commander-in-Chief in British India

Farwell, Byron: Queen Victoria's Little Wars, p. 27-31

Fear, Gratitude

“The unsuspecting fish, who knew nothing but a life in the river, went about its routine like any other day, but in an instant was ripped out of its reality to meet with death. Like that fish, we routinely live our lives hardly aware that, at the least expected moment, the yellow-eyed hawk of fate in the form of crises, tragedy or even death, may wrench us out of our comfortable environment. We regularly hear of it in the news or see it around us but rarely take seriously that it could happen to us. Perhaps the lesson here is to guard against complacency and give a higher priority to our spiritual needs. If the fish swam deeper, the hawk would not be able to reach it. Similarly, if we go deeper into our connection to God, we will find an inner reality so deep and satisfying that it lifts the consciousness to a place where we could deal with the effects of unforeseeable fate with a stable, detached mind.”

Radhanath Swami (1950) Gaudiya Vaishnava guru

?
The Journey Home: Autobiography of an American Swami (Tulsi Books, 2010)

Life, Death, God, Fate

“I really do live for the future, because when I'm eating a box of candy, I can't wait to taste the last piece. I don't even taste any of the other pieces, I just want to finish and throw the box away and not have to have it on my mind any more. I would rather either have it now or know I'll never have it so I don't have to think about it. That's why some days I wish I were very very old-looking so I wouldn't have to think about getting old-looking.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Ch. 7: Time

Thinking, Waiting, Future, Box

“In the emerging picture of mankind in the universe, the future (if it exists) will surely entail discoveries about space and time which will open up whole new perspectives in the relationship between mankind, mind, and the uni-verse.… But what is now? There is no such thing in physics; it is not even clear that ‘now’ could ever be described, let alone explained, in terms of physics.… Notions such as ‘the past,’ ‘the present’ and ‘the future’ seem to be more linguistic than physical.… There is no universal now, but only a personal one—a ‘here and now.’ This strongly suggests that we look to the mind, rather than to the physical world, as the origin of the division of time into past, present, and future.…There is none of this in physics.… No physical experiment has ever been performed to detect the passage of time. As soon as the objective world of reality is considered, the passage of time disappears like a ghost into the night.”

Paul Davies (1946) British physicist

Page 222, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521291514.
Space and Time in the Modern Universe (1977)

World, Reality, Universe, Time

“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 (1864–1912) British philosophical writer

As A Man Thinketh (1902)
Variant: Mind is the Master Power that molds and makes, And we are mind. And ever more we take the tool of thought, and shaping what we will, bring forth a thousand joys, or a thousand ills. We think in secret, and it comes to pass, environment, is but our looking glass.

Secret, Thinking, Joy

“Ambition, like a torrent, ne'er looks back;
And is a swelling, and the last affection
A high mind can put off; being both a rebel
Unto the soul and reason, and enforceth
All laws, all conscience, treads upon religion,
and offereth violence to nature's self.”

Ben Jonson Catiline His Conspiracy

Catiline His Conspiracy (1611), Act III, scene ii

Religion, Law, Soul, Nature

“Well, you must now imagine my friend at my age or almost there. You must picture him growing gray, tired of life and convinced that he had at last discovered the secret of peace. At this time he met, while visiting some relatives in a country house, a mere girl of twenty, who was the image, the haunting image of her whom he had hoped to marry thirty years before. It was one of those strange resemblances which extend from the color of the eyes to the 'timbre' of the voice, from the smile to the thought, from the gestures to the finest feelings of the heart. I could not, in a few disjointed phrases describe to you the strange emotions of my friend. It would take pages and pages to make you understand the tenderness, both present and at the same time retrospective, for the dead through the living; the hypnotic condition of the soul which does not know where dreams and memories end and present feeling begins; the daily commingling of the most unreal thing in the world, the phantom of a lost love, with the freshest, the most actual, the most irresistibly naïve and spontaneous thing in it, a young girl. She comes, she goes, she laughs, she sings, you go about with her in the intimacy of country life, and at her side walks one long dead. After two weeks of almost careless abandon to the dangerous delights of this inward agitation imagine my friend entering by chance one morning one of the less frequented rooms of the house, a gallery, where, among other pictures, hung a portrait of himself, painted when he was twenty-five. He approaches the portrait abstractedly. There had been a fire in the room, so that a slight moisture dimmed the glass which protected the pastel, and on this glass, because of this moisture, he sees distinctly the trace of two lips which had been placed upon the eyes of the portrait, two small delicate lips, the sight of which makes his heart beat. He leaves the gallery, questions a servant, who tells him that no one but the young woman he has in mind has been in the room that morning.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

Pierre Fauchery, as quoted by the character "Jules Labarthe"
The Age for Love

Love, Life, Secret, Age

“The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything—gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness—rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations…. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director

Preface: The Theater and Culture
The Theatre and Its Double (1938, translated 1958)

Life, Light

“Under the conditions of modern life we have more control over our thoughts, and in connection with this there is a special method by which we may work on the development of our consciousness using that instrument which is most obedient to our will; that is, our mind, or the intellectual centre. In order to understand more clearly what I am going to say, you must try to remember that we have no control over our consciousness. When I said that we can become more conscious, or that a man can be made conscious for a moment simply by asking him if he is conscious or not, I used the words "conscious" or "consciousness" in a relative sense. There are so many degrees of consciousness and every higher degree means "consciousness" in relation to a lower degree. But, if we have no control over consciousness itself, we have a certain control over our thinking about consciousness, and we can construct our thinking in such a way as to bring consciousness. What I mean is that by giving to our thoughts the direction which they would have in a moment of consciousness, we can, in this way, induce consciousness.”

P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947) Russian esotericist

Fourth Lecture, p. 74.
The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution (1950)

Life, Way, Understanding, Thinking

“He was the more surprised to see that Sumner invited a renewal of old relations. He found himself treated almost confidentially. Not only was he asked to make a fourth at Sumner's pleasant little dinners in the house on La Fayette Square, but he found himself admitted to the Senator's study and informed of his views, policy and purposes, which were sometimes even more astounding than his curious gaps or lapses of omniscience.

On the whole, the relation was the queerest that Henry Adams ever kept up. He liked and admired Sumner, but thought his mind a pathological study. At times he inclined to think that Sumner felt his solitude, and, in the political wilderness, craved educated society; but this hardly told the whole story. Sumner's mind had reached the calm of water which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contained nothing but itself.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Education, Thinking, Solitude, Study

“Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity's knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.”

PZ Myers (1957) American scientist and associate professor of biology

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/07/the_great_desecration.php
The Great Desecration
Pharyngula
2008-07-24

Life, Wisdom, God, Truth

“Becoming a nationalist is not a matter of decision; it means one has locked one’s mind forever. No reason or practical advice or evidence is strong enough to unlock it.”

Neamat Imam book The Black Coat

The Black Coat (2013)

Decision, Strong

““A king has soldiers, servants, messengers, lieutenants. He governs through his servants. Where are the servants of this—Anti-king?”
“In our minds, lad. In our minds. The traitor, the self; the self that cries I want to live; let the world burn so long as I can live! The little traitor soul in us, in the dark, like the worm in the apple.””

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 9, "Orm Embar" (Arren and Ged)

World, Soul

“And make up your mind about what bloody race you belong to. One minute it’s all about being a farmer’s boy in Northamptonshire and the next you’re on about the old days in Calcutta and what the British have done to Mother India and the snake-charmers and the bloody temple-bells. Ah, wake up, for God’s sake. You’re English right enough but you’re forgetting how to speak the bloody language, what with traipsing about with Punjabis and Sikhs and God knows what. You talk Hindustani in your sleep, man. Sort it out, for God’s sake. If you want to put a loincloth on, get cracking, but don’t expect the privileges --’ (the word came out in a wet blurr; the needle stuck for a couple of grooves) ‘the privileges, the privileges…”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

God, Boy, Sleep, Forgetting

“We're all like tools. Not only like tools, we are tools, tools of Time. We're worn into grooves by Time — by our habits. In the end, these grooves are going to show whether we've been second-rate or champions, each in his way, in dispatching the affairs of every day. By choosing our habits, we determine the grooves into which Time will wear us; and these are grooves that enrich our lives and make for ease of mind, peace, happiness - achievement.”

Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr. (1868–1924) American industrial engineer

Frank B. Gilbreth, cited in: American Magazine, Vol. 103 (1927), p. 183

Happiness, Peace, Way, Time

“If anything ever happened to any one who eagerly longed and never hoped, that is a true pleasure to the mind.”
Si quicquam cupido optantique optigit umquam insperanti, hoc est gratum animo proprie.

Gaio Valerio Catullo list of poems by Catullus

CVII, lines 1–2
Carmina

Pleasure, Hope

“Foreign debt and inflation have nothing to do with my decision. Indeed, I can assure you that [the Falklands war is] not going to alleviate inflation or debt. It is true that the Falklands have served to unite Argentines. But I swear and repeat that the idea of solving these issues through war has never crossed my mind.”

Leopoldo Galtieri (1926–2003) Argentine military dictator

Reportaje de Oriana Fallaci a Leopoldo F. Galtieri http://archivohistorico.educ.ar/content/reportaje-de-oriana-fallaci-leopoldo-f-galtieri#sthash.ZQrMQt2O.dpuf, Revista El porteño, August 1982

War, Idea, Decision

“They were not aware of the madness that lurked within their own minds.”

Michael Swanwick book Jack Faust

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 1, “Trinity” (p. 3)

Madness

“I really do, I like Ted Cruz a lot, I would say that we would certainly have things in mind for Ted, to be honest with you. I mean, he's somebody that I could certainly say that [about] because I like him.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Donald Trump, during a rally in Iowa. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12/11/donald-trump-questions-ted-cruzs-ties-to-major-oil-companies/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/in-iowa-donald-trump-hits-ted-cruz-on-ethanol-and-religion/ http://blogs.reuters.com/talesfromthetrail/2015/12/12/donald-trump-and-ted-cruz-are-best-of-frenemies/ (December 11, 2015) 2010s, 2015

“The importance of the lesson which this Society was formed to teach would be hard to overestimate. Its main purpose is to impress upon the people the necessity for reverence. This is the beginning of a proper conception of ourselves, of our relationship to each other, and our relationship to our Creator. Human nature cannot develop very far without it. The mind does not unfold, the creative faculty does not mature, the spirit does not expand, save under the influence of reverence. It is the chief motive of an obedience. It is only by a correct attitude of mind begun early in youth and carried through maturity that these desired results are likely to be secured. It is along the path of reverence and obedience that the race has reached the goal of freedom, of self-government, of a higher morality, and a more abundant spiritual life.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Authority and Religious Liberty (1924)

Life, People, Youth, Motivation

“It must always be borne in mind that each and every individual is not only a producer but a consumer. In the final analysis of our conditions, we have to admit that it is not lack of consumption, but lack of production which is our present economic danger. The immigrant is needed, provided this fact is overcome, provided supply—whether in schools, in homes, or in shoes—does not fall behind demand. The public could today consume much more of the necessities of food, shelter and clothing than they are able to procure or have ever been able to procure in a country where the standard of living is so high. If, through cheap labor, and an increased willingness on the part of alien labor to live on the edge of existence, these standards are threatened, then is the time to bring legislative action to bear on the situation.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

School, Food, Shoe, Home

“The Good Economist Hayek is the thinker who has mind-blowing insights into just why the competitive market system is such a marvelous societal device for coordinating our by now 7.2 billion-wide global division of labor. Few other economists imagined that Lenin’s centrally-planned economy behind the Iron Curtain was doomed to settle at a level of productivity 1/5 that of the capitalist industrial market economies outside. Hayek did so imagine. And Hayek had dazzling insights as to why. Explaining the thought of this Hayek requires not sociology or history of thought but rather appreciation, admiration, and respect for pure genius.The Bad Economist Hayek is the thinker who was certain that Keynes had to be wrong, and that the mass unemployment of the Great Depression had to have in some mysterious way been the fault of some excessively-profligate government entity (or perhaps of those people excessively clever with money–fractional-reserve bankers, and those who claim not the natural increase of flocks but rather the interest on barren gold). Why Hayek could not see with everybody else–including Milton Friedman–that the Great Depression proved that Say’s Law was false in theory, and that aggregate demand needed to be properly and delicately managed in order to make Say’s Law true in practice is largely a mystery. Nearly everyone else did: the Lionel Robbinses and the Arthur Burnses quickly marked their beliefs to market after the Great Depression and figured out how to translate what they thought into acceptable post-World War II Keynesian language. Hayek never did.
My hypothesis is that the explanation is theology: For Hayek, the market could never fail. For Hayek, the market could only be failed. And the only way it could be failed was if its apostles were not pure enough.”

J. Bradford DeLong (1960) American economist

Making Sense of Friedrich A. von Hayek: Focus/The Honest Broker for the Week of August 9, 2014 http://equitablegrowth.org/making-sense-friedrich-von-hayek-focusthe-honest-broker-week-august-9-2014/ (2014)

Money, War, People, World

“Hubert Ronson, as I was to discover later, is the sort of European you are always coming across in Africa. I never made up my mind whether such men leave Europe because their talents are unappreciated in the politer civilisations, or whether they develop them after they arrive. Bullies, thugs, warm-hearted layabouts, at heart they are all the same sentimental, anxious extroverts, with the same endless fund of dirty stories, and the same secret loathing and longing for the cultures they have escaped.”

John Pearson (author) (1930) author

Gone to Timbuctoo (1961), Ch. 11

Men, Secret, Heart

“My friends are all broad-minded, and well educated, but we do not keep a record of our conversations. The reason for this is (1) we are too lazy, and do not aspire to fame; (2) to talk gives us pleasure, but to write would give trouble; (3) none of us would be able to read it again after our deaths, so why worry; (4) if we wrote something this year we should probably find it all wrong the next year.”

Shi Nai'an (1296–1372) Chinese writer

Preface to Water Margin

Death, Pleasure, Education, Reading

“The digressions [ in Homer] are not meant to keep the reader in suspense … An episode that will increase suspense by retarding the action must be so constructed that it will not fill the present entirely, will not put the crisis, whose resolution is being awaited, entirely out of the reader’s mind, and thereby destroy the mood of suspense; the crisis and the suspense must continue, must remain vibrant in the background. But Homer—and to this we shall have to return later—knows no background. What he narrates is for the time being the only present, and fills both the stage and the reader’s mind completely.”

Erich Auerbach Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Source: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), p. 4

Mood, Time

“It is our will
That thus enchains us to permitted ill.
We might be otherwise, we might be all
We dream of happy, high, majestical.
Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek,
But in our mind? and if we were not weak,
Should we be less in deed than in desire?”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Source: Julian and Maddalo http://www.bartleby.com/139/shel115.html (1819), l. 170

Love, Happiness, Truth, Beauty

“Some claim that life, the universe, and mind are miraculous. My conclusion is that these things are really, really amazing, but that they’re not miraculous (unless by miraculous, you just mean ‘really, really amazing’).”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

(p. 74)
Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010)

Life, Universe

“The principle underpinning the EU is not "We, the people" but "We know better than the people" — not just on capital punishment and the single currency, but on pretty much anything that comes to mind. Not so long ago, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, France's Defence Minister at the time, insisted that the United States was dedicated to the "organized cretinization of our people." As a dismissal of American pop culture — MTV, Disney — this statement is not without its appeal, though it sounds better if you've never had the misfortune to sit through a weekend of continental television. But the reality is that nobody is as dedicated to the proposition that the people are cretins than M. Chevenement and the panjandrums of the new 'Europe.' The EU is organized on this assumption. If, like the Danes and now the Irish, they're impertinent enough to tick the wrong box in referenda on deeper European integration, we'll just keep asking and re-asking the question until they get it right.”

Mark Steyn (1959) Canadian writer

The slyer virus: The West's anti-westernism (2002)

People, Question, Reality, Time

“You had your thumb up your butt and your mind was in Arizona”

Bill Allred

Radio From Hell (June 8, 2005)

“But why should we hear about body bags and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or that or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that, and watch him (her husband, former president George H. W. Bush) suffer?”

Barbara Bush (1925–2018) former First Lady of the United States

Addressing the question of how much television news she'd recently been watching, in light of the enormous media attention given to likely outcomes in a U.S. war with Iraq. The interview took place two days prior to the start of the Iraq War, Good Morning America (18 March 2003)

Death, Beauty, Suffering

“The true, strong, and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

1778
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Life of Johnson (Boswell)

Strong

“Listening to that performance changed my life. It changed the course of my musical career. I could listen to my heart's voice clearly because the music had helped me understand my mind's deepest desires. Today, I am happy and feel blessed that I followed the path dictated by my heart.”

Hariprasad Chaurasia (1938) Indian bansuri player

On hearing a performance on a woodwind by Pandit Bhola Nath of Varanasi.
My father's wrestling techniques made my lungs strong: Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia

Life, Happiness, Music, Feeling

“To men a man is but a mind. Who cares
What face he carries or what form he wears?
But woman's body is the woman. O,
Stay thou, my sweetheart, and do never go,
But heed the warning words the sage hath said:
A woman absent is a woman dead.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Men, Dead

“After sketching his program for the scientific revolution that he foresaw, Bacon ends his account with a prayer: "Humbly we pray that this mind may be steadfast in us, and that through these our hands, and the hands of others to whom thou shalt give the same spirit, thou wilt vouchsafe to endow the human family with new mercies". That is still a good prayer for all of us as we begin the twenty-first century.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

Progress In Religion (2000)

Family

“Out of this folk mind, turned into stories and crowded with thousands of years of life, grew, literally, the Chinese novel. For these novels changed as they grew. If, as I have said, there are no single names attached beyond question to the great novels of China, it is because no one hand wrote them. From beginning as a mere tale, a story grew through succeeding versions, into a structure built by many hands.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

The Chinese Novel (1938)

Life, Question, Change

“[The Joker is a] psychopathic, mass murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy. … Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night. I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.”

Heath Ledger (1979–2008) Australian actor

Speaking about playing the Joker, in an interview conducted by Sarah Lyall, during filming of The Dark Knight, in London, as quoted in [Sarah Lyall, Movies: In Stetson or Wig, He's Hard to Pin Down, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/movies/moviesspecial/04lyal.html, The New York Times, Movies, nytimes.com, Web, November 4, 2007, 2008-08-18]

Thinking, Night

“The essence of cybernetic organizations is that they are self-controlling, self-maintaining, self-realizing. Indeed, cybernetics has been characterized as the “science of effective organization,” in just these terms.
But the word “cybernetics” conjures, in the minds of an apparently great number of people, visions of computerized information networks, closed loop systems, and robotized man-surrogates, such as “artorgas” and “cyborgs.””

Richard F. Ericson (1919–1993) American academic

Visions of Cybernetic Organizations (1972)

People, Science