Quotes about mind
page 58

“Whenever the mind of a person is rectified, he becomes strong and powerful in appearance.”

Ja'far al-Sadiq (702–765) Muslim religious person

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.78, p. 208
General Quotes

“The Communists have created the illusion in free men's minds that "the way to peace is through disarmament." We must not forget that this originated as a Communist slogan. Now free men have adopted it as their own and are even setting up special commissions to explore ways and means to carry it out. In this action we are deliberately closing our eyes to everything we promised ourselves at the close of World War II and again at the end of the Korean War. Experts tell us that to disarm in the face of an obvious and present danger is an immoral act. It is an act of self-destruction.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Men, War, World, Peace

“I was depressed for a long time. If you’re depressed long enough, it’s almost a comfort, a state of mind that you’ve made peace with because you’ve been in it so long. It’s a very selfish world.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Interview with Men's Health magazine, September 2006 https://www.menshealth.com/guy-wisdom/chris-cornell-death-depression-suicide-interview, <br class="br">On depression and suicide

World, Peace, Time, Selfishness

“The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in a controversial study on the origin of consciousness, argued that the bicameral mind - in which one of the hemispheres becomes specialized in silent reading - is a late development in humankind's evolution, and that the process by which this function develops is still changing.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

The Silent Readers, p. 46.
A History of Reading (1996)

Study, Change, Reading

“When the great religious and philosophical conceptions were alive, thinking people did not extol humility and brotherly love, justice and humanity because it was realistic to maintain such principles and odd and dangerous to deviate from them, or because these maxims were more in harmony with their supposedly free tastes than others. They held to such ideas because they saw in them elements of truth, because they connected them with the idea of logos, whether in the form of God or of a transcendental mind, or even of nature as an eternal principle.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 34.

Love, God, People, Truth

“If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt, that atheists are as plentiful as blackberries.”

Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) British author, literary critic, and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography

The Fortnightly Review, vol. 34 (1880) p. 177

God, People, Thinking

“You get a script and you love it. You find a director that you trust, and it becomes all about how do I commit to this as fully as possible? And the last thing you can afford to have in your mind is what are other people going to think of this?”

James Van Der Beek (1977) actor

CinemaSource: James Van Der Beek Interview: Dan Deevy, January 28, 2008

Love, People, Thinking

“The keenest pangs the wretched find
Are rapture to the dreary void,
The leafless desert of the mind,
The waste of feelings unemployed.”

George Gordon Byron The Giaour

Source: The Giaour (1813), Line 957.

Feeling

“Some individuals may themselves be deceived by the compelling words of other individuals, but a much more significant number fall into the same state after being hypnotised by continuous eye-fixation upon an object and concentration of mind. This state can even be established before the eyelids are closed or a pronounced tendency to sleep has been felt. Suggestibility can also be increased by the sight of other patients in the experiment, and that by virtue of the laws of sympathy and imitation.”

James Braid (1795–1860) Scottish surgeon, hypnotist, and hypnotherapist

Original Philosophy of Hypnotism The International College of Hypnosis & Hypnotherapy

Law, Sleep

“It is at any rate evident, that a large and ample province remains for the exercise of Providence, without its being naturally perceptible by us; because obscurity, when applied to the interruption of laws, bears a necessary proportion to the imperfection of our knowledge when applied to the laws themselves, or rather to the effects which these laws, under their various and incalculable combinations, would of their own accord produce. And if it be said, that the doctrine of Divine Providence, by reason of the ambiguity under which its exertions present themselves, can be attended with no practical influenceupon our conduct; that, although we believe ever so firmly that there is a Providence, we must prepare, and provide, and act, as if there were none; I answer, that this is admitted: and that we further allege, that so to prepare, and so to provide, is consistent with the most perfect assurance of the reality of a Providence; and not only so, but that it is probably one advantage of the present state of our information, that our provisions and preparations are not disturbed by it. Or if it be still asked, Of what use at all then is the doctrine, if it neither alter our measures nor regulate our conduct? I answer again, that it is of the greatest use, but that it is a doctrine of sentiment and piety, not (immediately at least) of action or conduct; that it applies to the consolation of men's minds, to their devotions, to the excitement of gratitude, the support of patience, the keeping alive and the strengthening of every motive for endeavouring to please our Maker; and that these are great uses.”

William Paley (1743–1805) Christian apologist, natural theologian, utilitarian

Source: Natural Theology (1802), Ch. 26 : The Goodness of the Deity.

Men, Law, Exercises, Motivation

“But if some mind very different from ours were to look upon some property of some curved line as we do on the evenness of a straight line, he would not recognize as such the evenness of a straight line; nor would he arrange the elements of his geometry according to that very different system, and would investigate quite other relationships as I have suggested in my notes.
We fashion our geometry on the properties of a straight line because that seems to us to be the simplest of all. But really all lines that are continuous and of a uniform nature are just as simple as one another. Another kind of mind which might form an equally clear mental perception of some property of any one of these curves, as we do of the congruence of a straight line, might believe these curves to be the simplest of all, and from that property of these curves build up the elements of a very different geometry, referring all other curves to that one, just as we compare them to a straight line. Indeed, these minds, if they noticed and formed an extremely clear perception of some property of, say, the parabola, would not seek, as our geometers do, to rectify the parabola, they would endeavor, if one may coin the expression, to parabolify the straight line.”

Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787) Croat-Italian physicist

"Boscovich's mathematics", an article by J. F. Scott, in the book Roger Joseph Boscovich (1961) edited by Lancelot Law Whyte.
"Transient pressure analysis in composite reservoirs" (1982) by Raymond W. K. Tang and William E. Brigham.
"Non-Newtonian Calculus" (1972) by Michael Grossman and Robert Katz.

Fashion, Nature

“Humans… entered the 'cognitive niche.' Remember the definition of intelligence from Chapter 2: using knowledge of how things work to attain goals in the face of obstacles. By learning which manipulations achieve which goals, humans have mastered the art of the surprise attack. They use novel, goal-oriented courses of action to overcome the Maginot Line defenses of other organisms, which can respond only over evolutionary time. The manipulations can be novel because human knowledge is not just couched in concrete instructions like 'how to catch a rabbit.' Humans analyze the world using intuitive theories of objects, forces, paths, places, manners, states, substances, hidden biochemical essences, and, for other animals and people, beliefs and desires…. People compose new knowledge and plans by mentally playing out combinatorial interactions among these laws in their mind's eye.”

Steven Pinker book How the Mind Works

Source: How the Mind Works (1997), p. 188

People, World, Law, Art

“Mindfulness is present-moment awareness. It takes place in the here and now. It is the observance of what is happening right now, in the present. It stays forever in the present, perpetually on the crest of the ongoing wave of passing time.”

Henepola Gunaratana (1927) Sri Lankan Buddhist monk

Source: Mindfulness in Plain English (2011), p. 134

Time

“What makes a piece of mathematical economics not only mathematics but also economics is, I believe, this: When we set up a system of theoretical relationships and use economic names for the otherwise purely theoretical variables involved, we have in mind some actual experiment, or some design of an experiment, which we could at least imagine arranging, in order to measure those quantities in real economic life that we think might obey the laws imposed on their theoretical namesakes.”

Trygve Haavelmo (1911–1999) Norwegian economist and econometrician

Trygve Haavelmo, "The probability approach in econometrics" in: Supplement to Econometrica. 12 91944), p. 5; Cited in Pearl (2012, 1-2)

Life, Law, Imagination, Mathematics

“When one cultivates strong concentration by means of tranquility or insight meditation, the mind is no longer distracted by thoughts and other hindrances. Such pure concentration, continuously focused on an object for either tranquility or insight, is considered mental purification. A mind associated with such concentration is also purified of hindrances due to the power of the concentration.”

Mahasi Sayadaw (1904–1982) Burmese Buddhist philosopher

Source: Manual of Insight (1945), p. 45

Strong

“Thus the world of minds, as the sole world of Ends presupposed in all moral responsibility, the world of ultimate and standard Objects, becomes at one and the same stroke the warranting foundation of knowledge and of good-will alike: to refuse good-will is to violate the primary principle of each mind's own existence, and is therefore to convict oneself, in one and the same act, of irrationality and folly as well as of indifference or of ill-will.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Preface to Second Edition, p.xxxvii

World, Knowledge, Indifference

“I pay attention to what’s going on around me. I’m always looking for new energy, new talent, new voices. When you do that I think it’s easier to come up with fresh ideas. It's not that my career has been based on surprising people, but it’s been about challenging myself — to constantly do new things that are going to broaden my own mind and in the process, hopefully, connect with other people.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Parade magazine 24 June 2008 http://www.parade.com/celebrity/celebrity-parade/archive/pc_0179.html

People, Idea, Thinking

“Far from making peace, wars invariably serve as classrooms and laboratories where men and techniques and states of mind are prepared for the next war.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

"A Statement against the War in Vietnam".
The Long-Legged House (1969)

Men, War, Peace

“I feel no care of coin,
Well-doing is my wealth;
My mind to me an empire is,
While grace affordeth health.”

Robert Southwell (1561–1595) English Jesuit

Source: Content and Rich, Line 25; p. 58.

Health, Feeling, Wealth

“We disagree about who should be Americanized. The immigrant, working in some of the industries, and set apart from American life, thinks the native-born needs it most; the American, visiting the crowded quarters of his city, thinks the immigrant needs it more; and there is as yet no common meeting ground of men's minds upon whom to Americanize and especially upon how to go about it. Despite the great contributive value of the Liberty Loan, the Red Cross, the war camp communities, the Councils of Defense, and other activities that are helping to unite the many peoples, the fusion of a youthful race with those wise races of the old world, which have withstood many an enthusiasm and many a peril, cannot be achieved by a popular movement or by sporadic specialized campaigns. Without specific knowledge of points of differentiation and without sympathetic points of contact, anything like real fusion becomes impossible.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Life, Men, War, People

“And you can tell everybody, this is your song.
It may be quite simple but now that it's done,
I hope you don't mind, I hope you don't mind
That I put down in words
How wonderful life is while you're in the world.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Your Song
Song lyrics, Elton John (1970)

Life, World, Hope

“Cybernetics as a specific field grew out of a series of interdisciplinary meetings held from 1944 to 1953 that brought together a number of noted post-war intellectuals, including Wiener, John von Neumann, Warren McCulloch, Claude Shannon, Heinz von Foerster, W. Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. Hosted by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, these became known as the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics. From its original focus on machines and animals, cybernetics quickly broadened to encompass minds (e. g. in the work of Bateson and Ashby) and social systems (e. g. Stafford Beer's management cybernetics), thus recovering Plato's original focus on the control relations in society.
Through the 1950s, cybernetic thinkers came to cohere with the school of General Systems Theory (GST), founded at about the same time by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, as an attempt to build a unified science by uncovering the common principles that govern open, evolving systems. GST studies systems at all levels of generality, whereas Cybernetics focuses more specifically on goal-directed, functional systems which have some form of control relation.”

Francis Heylighen (1960) Belgian cyberneticist

Source: Cybernetics and Second-Order Cybernetics (2001), p.2 Cited in: " Notes on Heylighen 2001 http://thinkipedia.wikispaces.com/Notes+on+Heylighen+2001" at thinkipedia.wikispaces.com, 2013

War, School, Beer, Study

“There's nothing that's ever happened in the world that didn't start in one human mind.”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

2000s, In Depth with Tom Clancy (2002)

World

““William, please. Heed your heart.”
He thrust his foot into the stirrup. “No, it’s a singularly unreliable organ. I think I’ll use my mind, and… consider.””

Melinda M. Snodgrass (1951) American writer

Source: Queen's Gambit Declined (1989), Chapter 18 (p. 231)

Thinking, Heart

“There are many possible realities, infinitely many. Yet most of them are not... alive. Most of them are like books that no one ever actually wrote. A group-mind, like humanity's, lights up one given world. What makes this world different from some ghostly alternative universe is that we actually live here.”

Rudy Rucker (1946) American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author and philosopher

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 171

Books, World, Reality, Light

“How intricately our loins are linked to our minds, and how tricky a thing it is when we embrace a woman while pretending she is another!”

Robert Silverberg book A Time of Changes

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 25 (p. 85)

“The phenomena which we call the crowd-mind, instead of being the outgrowth of the directly social, are social only in the sense that all mental life has a social significance; they are rather the result of forces hidden in the personal and unconscious psyche of the members of the crowd, forces which are merely released by social gatherings of a certain sort.”

Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941)

Source: The Behavior of Crowds (1920), p. 7

Life, Sense, Personality

“The third category of which I come now to speak is precisely that whose reality is denied by nominalism. For although nominalism is not credited with any extraordinarily lofty appreciation of the powers of the human soul, yet it attributes to it a power of originating a kind of ideas the like of which Omnipotence has failed to create as real objects, and those general conceptions which men will never cease to consider the glory of the human intellect must, according to any consistent nominalism, be entirely wanting in the mind of Deity.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

Lecture II : The Universal Categories, §3. Laws: Nominalism, CP 5.62
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)

Men, Soul, Idea, Reality

“To a hypothetical alien with a vastly superior intellect to our own, human minds would be classed as intermediate forms between the mindless and the fully minded.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 151

“You can't make a perfect painting. We can see perfection in our minds. But we can't make a perfect painting.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

interview with Joan Simon, 1995 in Perfection is in the Mind, p. 86; as quoted in A House Divided: American Art Since 1955, Anne M. G. Wagner, Univ. of California Press, 2012, p. 263
1980 - 2000

Painting, Perfection

“The Germans really conceive of their country as always under war conditions in this respect. No one expects a belligerent to tell the truth and, to the German mind, they are always belligerent. The Germans take the view that war is only intensified peace.”

Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood (1864–1958) lawyer, politician and diplomat in the United Kingdom

Letter to Lord Londonderry (May 1938); published in Wings of Destiny (1943) by Marquess of Londonderry, p. 211

War, Truth, Peace, Country

“An old oriental saying tells us, ‘when our willpower is concentrated upon a stone, it can pass through it. When our willpower is focused and in harmony with the universe, it can command the wind, rain and thunder’. But from where does our willpower come? Those who understand and answer this question are those who accomplish important tasks. When we coordinate mind and body by stilling the waves of our mind to imperceptible, infinitely decreasing ripples, we can send forth our great willpower that moves the universe.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

19 : Willpower
Ki Sayings (2003)

Understanding, Question, Universe

“And the first studio I went to [in New York, c. 1950]... I was trying to find de Kooning because he had a painting at the Whitney, which was in the old Studio School [Eighth Street], you know... And I thought I would like to know him. I really dug his painting, and I dug Gorky's painting... But the first studio I went into was Franz Kline... and there were all these Klines, unstretched, hanging on the brick walls. Beautiful. You know, with the telephone book drawings all over the floor, and Kline yakking away, and it was just, I was out of my mind! And so from then on I got involved in the Artists Club. They allowed very few women in, and I was included for $35 a year. And I got very involved in the Cedar Bar and the whole thing..”

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) American painter

second side of the first tape
1975 - 1992, Oral history interview with Joan Mitchell, 1986

Women, Books, School, Beauty

“And so what remains in our lives? What remains in this whole, entire world to do? And like I was saying, where does Mr. Mind take you and put you every time? Where does that mind place you? It places you every time at a place that has nothing to do with the outrageous that has nothing, has nothing to do with the with the beautiful, has nothing to do with the incredible, has nothing to with anything except darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness. And this is where the mind puts you.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Holi Festival, Miami, Florida, on Sunday, April 1978, printed in Divine Times April/May 1978 Volume 7, Number 3
1970s

World, Beauty, Time

“Music helps you understand the deeper musings of the mind. Listening to music can help a person to a better understanding of his inner drives. This, in turn, gives him the confidence to follow the path in life dictated by his heart.”

Hariprasad Chaurasia (1938) Indian bansuri player

My father's wrestling techniques made my lungs strong: Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia

Life, Music, Confidence, Understanding

“Statistics should be taught early so that the concepts are absorbed by the student's flexible, adaptable mind before it is too late.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

“She had called Martin a 'lie-hunter,' a 'truth-seeker.' They decided now that most people who call themselves 'truth-seekers'—persons who scurry about chattering of Truth as though it were a tangible separable thing, like houses or salt or bread—did not so much desire to find Truth as to cure their mental itch. In novels, these truth-seekers quested the 'secret of life' in laboratories which did not seem to be provided with Bunsen flames or reagents; or they went, at great expense and much discomfort from hot trains and undesirable snakes, to Himalayan monasteries, to learn from unaseptic sages that the Mind can do all sort of edifying things if one will but spend thirty or forty years in eating rice and gazing on one's navel. To these high matters Martin responded, 'Rot!' He insisted that there is no Truth but only many truths; that Truth is not a colored bird to be chased among the rocks and captured by its tail, but a skeptical attitude toward life. He insisted that no one could expect more than, by stubbornness or luck, to have the kind of work he enjoyed and an ability to become better acquainted with the facts of that work than the average job-holder.”

Sinclair Lewis book Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith (1925), Ch. 25

Life, People, Truth, Lie

“Much has been said of late about world ideals. But I prefer to think of the ideal for America. I like to think there's something more than the patriotism and practical wisdom of the founding fathers. It's good to believe that maybe destiny held this New World republic to be the supreme example of representative democracy and orderly liberty by which humanity is inspired to higher achievement. It is idle to think we have attained perfection, but there is the satisfying knowledge that we hold orderly processes for making our government reflect the heart and mind of the Republic.”

Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) American politician, 29th president of the United States (in office from 1921 to 1923)

1920s, The American Soldier (1920)

Wisdom, World, Democracy, Knowledge

“As for the passions and studies of the mind: avoid envy; anxious fears; anger fretting inwards; subtle and knotty inquisitions; joys and exhilarations in excess; sadness not communicated. Entertain hopes; mirth rather than joy; variety of delights, rather than surfeit of them; wonder and admiration, and therefore novelties; studies that fill the mind with splendid and illustrious objects, as histories, fables, and contemplations of nature.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Regimen of Health
Essays (1625)

Sadness, Fear, Hope, History

“For all of us, explicit memory makes it possible to leap across space and time and conjure up events and emotional states that have vanished into the past yet somehow continue to live in our minds.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

Memory, Time, Past

“When once the idea of the separate condensation was started, all these improvements followed as corollaries in quick succession, so that in the course of one or two days the invention was thus far complete in my mind, and I immediately set about an experiment to verify it practically.”

James Watt (1736–1819) British engineer

"Notes on Professor Robison's Dissertation on Steam-engines" (1769)

Idea, Success

“I was introduced to the great philosophical systems of the past to which the Western universities have given their blessing, arranging and classifying them with the delicate care lavished on museum pieces. When once these systems were so handled, it was natural that they should be regarded as monuments of human intellection. And monuments, because they mark achievements at their particular point in history, soon become conservative in the impression which they make on posterity. I was introduced to Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx and other immortals, to whom I should like to refer as the university philosophers. But these titans were expounded in such a way that a student from a colony could easily find his breast agitated by Conflicting attitudes. These attitudes can have effects which spread out over a whole society, should such a student finally pursue a political life. A colonial student does not by origin belong to the intellectual history in which the university philosophers are such impressive landmarks. The colonial student can be so seduced by these attempts to give a philosophical account of the universe, that surrenders his whole personality to them. When he does this, he loses sight of the fundamental social fact that he is a colonial subject. In this way, he omits to draw from his education and from the concern displayed by the great philosophers for human problems, anything which he might relate to the very real problem of colonial domination, which, as it happens, conditions the immediate life of every colonized African. With single-minded devotion, the colonial student meanders through the intricacies of the philosophical systems. And yet these systems did aim at providing a philosophical account ofthe world in the circumstances and conditions of their time. For even philosophical systems are facts of history. By the time, however, that they come to be accepted in the universities for exposition, they have lost the vital power which they had at their first statement, they have shed their dynamism and polemic reference. This is a result of the academic treatment which they are given. The academic treatment is the result of an attitude to philosophical systems as though there was nothing to them hut statements standing in logical relation to one another. This defective approach to scholarship was suffered hy different categories of colonial student. Many of them had heen handpicked and, so to say, carried certificates ofworthiness with them. These were considered fit to become enlightened servants of the colonial administration. The process by which this category of student became fit usually started at an early age, for not infrequently they had lost contact early in life with their traditional background. By reason of their lack of contact with their own roots, they became prone to accept some theory of universalism, provided it was expressed in vague, mellifluous terms. Armed with their universalism, they carried away from their university courses an attitude entirely at variance with the concrete reality of their people and their struggle. When they came across doctrines of a combative nature, like those of Marxism, they reduced them to arid abstractions, to common-room subtleties. In this way, through the good graces oftheir colonialist patrons, these students, now competent in the art of forming not a concrete environmental view of social political problems, but an abstract, 'liberal' outlook, began to fulfil the hopes and expectations oftheir guides and guardians.”

Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) Pan Africanist and First Prime Minister and President of Ghana

Source: Consciencism (1964), Introduction, pp. 2-4.

Life, People, Age, World

“That won't do at all.. we've got to have this.. I don't mind for myself, but I don't want any other Foreign Secretary of this country to be talked to or at by a Secretary of State in the United States as I have just had in my discussions with Mr Byrnes. We've got to have this thing over here whatever it costs.. We've got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.”

Ernest Bevin (1881–1951) British labour leader, politician, and statesman

Peter Hennessy, "Cabinets and the Bomb", Oxford University Press 2007, p. 48.
Remarks at Cabinet Committee GEN75, 25 October 1946, about the development of the British atomic bomb.

Country

“I am sure every Englishman who has a heart in his breast and a feeling of justice in his mind, sympathizes with those unfortunate Danes (cheers), and wishes that this country could have been able to draw the sword successfully in their defence (continued cheers); but I am satisfied that those who reflect on the season of the year when that war broke out, on the means which this country could have applied for deciding in one sense that issue, I am satisfied that those who make these reflections will think that we acted wisely in not embarking in that dispute. (Cheers.) To have sent a fleet in midwinter to the Baltic every sailor would tell you was an impossibility, but if it could have gone it would have been attended by no effectual result. Ships sailing on the sea cannot stop armies on land, and to have attempted to stop the progress of an army by sending a fleet to the Baltic would have been attempting to do that which it was not possible to accomplish. (Hear, hear.) If England could have sent an army, and although we all know how admirable that army is on the peace establishment, we must acknowledge that we have no means of sending out a force at all equal to cope with the 300,000 or 400,000 men whom the 30,000,000 or 40,000,000 of Germany could have pitted against us, and that such an attempt would only have insured a disgraceful discomfiture—not to the army, indeed, but to the Government which sent out an inferior force and expected it to cope successfully with a force so vastly superior. (Cheers.) … we did not think that the Danish cause would be considered as sufficiently British, and as sufficiently bearing on the interests and the security and the honour of England, as to make it justifiable to ask the country to make those exertions which such a war would render necessary.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech at Tiverton (23 August 1864) on the Second Schleswig War, quoted in ‘Lord Palmerston At Tiverton’, The Times (24 August 1864), p. 9.
1860s

Men, War, Peace, Justice

“Of course the King is mistaken. But is natural that he should be frighten of taking the plunge. We have lost a great opportunity by not intervening at once. But later the King may change his mind, and it may be not too late.”

Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936) Greek politician

Source: Victory of Venizelos, 1920, p. 176 ; After one of the many attempts of Venizelos to persuade King Constantine, that Greece should join the Allies in the World War I.

Nature, Change

“If we giv up our minds tew little things we never shall be fit for big ones. I knew a man once who could ketch more flies with one swoop ov his hand than enny boddy else could, and he want good at ennything else.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

“The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The Temptation to Exist (1956)

Life

“The gold rush changed California, it changed the whole west, and it changed America's sense of itself because for the first time the United States of America, in the minds of the American people, fulfilled the dream of Jefferson, which was a continental nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific. No one thought about America stretching from Chesapeake Bay to San Francisco Bay until fathers and sons and uncles and brothers and fiances were out there.”

J. S. Holliday (1924–2006) American historian

The West (1996)

People, Dreams, Sense, Change

“In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons […] who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.”

Edward Bernays book Propaganda

Source: Propaganda (1928), p. 37–38

World, Way, Understanding, Business

“Thou has left behind
Powers that will work for thee,—air, earth, and skies!
There 's not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

To Toussaint L'Ouverture, l. 12 (1807).

Love, Forgetting

“For with what eyes of the mind was your Plato able to see that workhouse of such stupendous toil, in which he makes the world to be modelled and built by God? What materials, what bars, what machines, what servants, were employed in so vast a work? How could the air, fire, water, and earth, pay obedience and submit to the will of the architect? From whence arose those five forms, of which the rest were composed, so aptly contributing to frame the mind and produce the senses? It is tedious to go through all, as they are of such a sort that they look more like things to be desired than to be discovered.”
Quibus enim oculis animi intueri potuit vester Plato fabricam illam tanti operis, qua construi a deo atque aedificari mundum facit; quae molitio, quae ferramenta, qui vectes, quae machinae, qui ministri tanti muneris fuerunt; quem ad modum autem oboedire et parere voluntati architecti aer, ignis, aqua, terra potuerunt; unde vero ortae illae quinque formae, ex quibus reliqua formantur, apte cadentes ad animum afficiendum pariendosque sensus? Longum est ad omnia, quae talia sunt, ut optata magis quam inventa videantur.

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

Book I, section 19
De Natura Deorum – On the Nature of the Gods (45 BC)

God, World, Sense, Water

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

Nagara Sutta, Samyutta Nikaya II.124, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Pali Canon, Sutta Pitaka, Samyutta Nikaya (Connected Discourses)

Death, Age, Travel, Feeling

“The metaphor of the watch was very much used by the deists. And of course, watches run down, and break down, and it was believed by many of them that if an intelligence had begun the universe, begun the process, he'd took no further interest in it - didn't intervene in human affairs, didn't mind who won the war, didn't mind which country was the leading one, watched with relative—well, or didn't watch—with indifference, plague, famine, war and so forth. That's a very hard position to oppose, by the way. It's impossible, actually, to disprove - one can only the evidence for it isn't quite strong enough to be persuasive. To be a theist, to be a member of a monotheistic religion, that believes that truth has been revealed, that god has intervened in human affairs, that he has a plan for us - each of as individually and as a species, and that it shows - is a very much more difficult undertaking. I'm gonna show why I think it's more or less impossible.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Christopher Hitchens vs. William Dembski, 18/11/2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctuloBOYolE&t=9m23s <br class="br">2010s, 2010

God, War, Truth, Religion

“As around the sun the earth knows she's revolving,
And the rosebuds know to bloom in early May,
Just as hate knows love's the cure,
You can rest your mind assured,
That I'll be loving you always.”

Stevie Wonder (1950) American musician

As
Song lyrics, Songs In The Key of Life (1976)

Love, Hate, Sun

“And thus daily, and month by month, and year by year, he will work at his mind, training it in these consecutive habits of thought, and he will learn to choose that of which he thinks; he will no longer allow thoughts to come and go; he will no longer permit a thought to grip him and hold him; he will no longer let a thought come into the mind and fix itself there and decline to be evicted; he will be master within his own house… he will say: “No; no such anxiety shall remain within my mind; no such thought shall have shelter within my mind; within this mind nothing stays that is not there by my choice and my invitation, and that which comes uninvited shall be turned outside the limits of my mind.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Source: https://theosophy.world/sites/default/files/ebooks/Annie%20Besant-In-The-Outer-Court.pdf In the Outer Court, 1895, p. 60

Thinking, Learning, Housing, Training

“This breakdown in the bicameral mind in what is called the Intermediate Period is reminiscent at least of those periodic breakdowns of Mayan civilizations when all authority suddenly collapsed, and the population melted back into tribal living in the jungles.”

Julian Jaynes book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Book II, Chapter 2, p. 197
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)

“Whatever "Cold War system" there might once have been here is already defunct. There was never such a system in the minds of the opposed leaders, despite the peninsula’s tragic importance to Moscow and Washington. It might have been better if there had been. I’m not being flippant. Germans in East and West benefited from how each system tried to prove itself more compassionate and democratic, more conducive to its citizens' realization of their potential than the other. The relevant standards could hardly have been more different, but still. In contrast North and South Korea slid quickly into mutual nationalist recrimination, with each side accusing the other of subservience to a foreign power. This (not the over-weighted fact that Ossis and Wessis never clashed on the battlefield) is the main reason Bonn and East Berlin were able to maintain a coldly civil working relationship, routinizing mail service, family reunions, transit, etc, even at the height of Cold War tension.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Confederation Again (July 2018)

War, Family

“It is no small mischief to a boy, that many of the best years of his life should be devoted to the learning of what can never be of any real use to any human being. His mind is necessarily rendered frivolous and superficial by the long habit of attaching importance to words instead of things; to sound instead of sense.”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

“To Mr. Benbow,” Political Register (29 November 1817).

Life, Boy, Sense, Learning

“The mind celebrates a little triumph whenever it can formulate a truth.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. IV, Reason in Art

Truth

“You were raised perfectly well, better than most. If you feel that the world has treated you unfairly, you have achieved a state of mind well known to all teenagers, but maintained only by adults of a more shrill and self-absorbed type.”

John C. Wright (1961) American novelist and technical writer

Source: Titans of Chaos (2007), Chapter 22, “The Bubble Bath” (p. 306)

World, Feeling

“I was actually really lucky to be a part of this iconic franchise and that my role is so iconic. By the way, these are things that never entered my consciousness. For one I was so young, and two I had no idea and did not predict the future for that movie. I’m so grateful for it and honored. I mean there’s crazy things like that role have been shown on the Oscars multiple times and also Wes and I were hanging in their director’s guild, that big poster of us for years. Things like that I’m honored and flabbergasted by. It’s fantastic and I’m very thankful because so much of my career flowed from that. It’s still mind-boggling to me!”

Amanda Wyss (1960) American actress

INTERVIEW WITH AMANDA WYSS OF ‘A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET’ & ‘THE ID’ http://horrorgeeklife.com/2016/11/10/interview-amanda-wyss/ (November 10, 2016)

Way, Idea, Time, Future

“Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading.”

Sarah Orne Jewett book The Country of the Pointed Firs

Source: The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Ch. 10

Reading

“Aspirants lose much by refusing to let go of that which the lower mind cherishes. When they do succeed in being entirely open minded, and are ready to accept the new theories and hypotheses, they discover that the old and dearly held truth is not really lost, but only relegated to its rightful place in a larger scheme.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: Esoteric Healing (1953), p. 2

Truth

“Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do so you will find something you have never seen before. Follow it up, explore around it, and before you know it, you will have something to think about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the result of thought.”

Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) scientist and inventor known for his work on the telephone

Engraving at Bell Labs as quoted in Comprehending and Decoding the Cosmos: Discovering Solutions to Over a Dozen Cosmic Mysteries by Jerome Drexler (2006). p. viii.
Disputed

Thinking, Time

“… (a flash of insight) never comes by itself, in the sense that it comes effortless. You really need to work for it. There is a good proverb that says "fortuity helps the prepared mind." Insight will come by chance, but you only get it if you are prepared. Insight doesn't come by its own.”

Carlo Beenakker (1960) Dutch physicist

... (een flits van inzicht) komt nooit vanzelf, in de zin dat je er geen moeite voor hoeft te doen. Je moet je er echt wel voor inspannen. Er is een mooi spreekwoord voor: “toeval schiet de voorbereide geest te hulp”.
Zo’n inzicht komt wel toevallig, maar je krijgt het alleen als je bent voorbereid. Het inzicht komt niet vanzelf.
In Interview with Professor Carlo Beenakker. Interviewers: Ramy El-Dardiry and Roderick Knuiman (February 1, 2006).

Sense, Chance, Help

“Men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least, for they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect idea that they subsequently express with their hands”

Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) Italian painter, architect, writer and historian

Often attributed to Giorgio Vasari, while in the text Vasari attributes these words to Leonardo da Vinci in: Giorgio Vasari. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects as translated by Mrs. Jonathan Foster (1852), Vol. 2;
Misattributed

Men, Idea, Thinking, Perfection

“The way of yoga followed here has a different purpose from others, — for its aim is not only to rise out of the ordinary ignorant world-consciousness into the divine consciousness, but to bring the supramental power of that divine consciousness down into the ignorance of mind, life and body, to transform them, to manifest the Divine here and create a divine life in Matter.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Lights on Yoga (1935)

Life, World, Way

“I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"Common Places," No. 60, The Literary Examiner (September - December 1823)

Hate, Effort, Rage, Sea

“Our mind is all we've got. Not that it won't lead us astray sometimes, but we still have to analyze things out within ourselves.”

Bobby Fischer (1943–2008) American chess prodigy, chess player, and chess writer

1970s, BOBBY FISCHER SPEAKS OUT! (1977)

“The quality of the human mind, considered in its collective aspect, which most strikes us, in surveying this record, is its colossal patience.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Squaring the Circle (1913), p. 12

Patience

“Taoist yogis sought to harness the Tao directly, drawing it first into their own heart-minds and then beaming it to others. Yogis who managed this feat would for the most part be unnoticed, but their life-giving enterprise did more for the community than the works of other benefactors.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)

Life, Communication, Heart, Parting

“Some men are born to feast, and not to fight;
Whose sluggish minds, e'en in fair honor's field,
Still on their dinner turn—
Let such pot-boiling varlets stay at home,
And wield a flesh-hook rather than a sword.”

Joanna Baillie (1762–1851) Scottish poet and dramatist

Act I, scene 1.
Count Basil (1798)

Men, Home, Fight

“Family Affair, to spend time with his family in Hawaii, before casting as Hardcastle: "I get tired of sitting home and doin' nothing. If I'm doing something eight months of the year, I don't mind loafing the other four. But, lately, I've been finding fewer and fewer movies I'd like to do. And when that happens, I get hard to live with. Then this thing came along. I read it. I liked it. This character Hardcastle: I figured I could live with him for five years if I had to. There was something going on there. You don't get a helluva lot of character in series TV. They're more likely to star the car.”

Brian Keith (1921–1997) actor

TVGuide.com
Brian Keith 1984 about leaving

Family, Cars, Home, Star

“She said “Oh rather thank thy God,
My lot is not thine own.
How would my weary feet rejoice
Like thine to walk and run
Over the soft and fragrant grass,
Beneath yon cheerful sun.
And yet I trust to God's good will
My spirit is resign'd;
Though sore my sickness, it is borne
At least with patient mind.
Though noble be my father's name,
And vast my father's wealth;
He would give all, could he but give
His only child thy health!
Ah, judge not by the outside show
Of this world, vain and frail —””

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Lady Marian
Traits and Trials of Early Life (1836)

God, Health, World, Grass

“Postumus was clever: he guessed that this would make Cato angry enough to forget himself. And Cato rose to the bait, shouting out with a string of old-fashioned curses that in the days of his ancestor, whose memory this stammering imp was insulting, woe betide any child who failed in reverence to his elders; for they dealt out discipline with a heavy hand in those days. Whereas in these degenerate times the leading men of Rome gave any ignorant oafish lout (this was for Postumus) or any feeble-minded decrepit-limbed little whippersnapper (this was for me) full permission—
Postumus interrupted with a warning smile: "So I was right. The degenerate Augustus insults the great Censor by employing you in his degenerate family. I suppose you have told the Lady Livia just how you feel about things?"”

Robert Graves book I, Claudius

Source: I, Claudius (1934), Ch. 5.

Men, Family, Smile, Feeling

“When others seem to take advantage of you, do not retaliate by trying to take advantage of them. Use your power in improving yourself, so that you can do better and better work. That is how you are going to win in the race. Later on, those who tried to take advantage of you will be left in the rear. Remember, those who are dealing unjustly with you or with anybody are misusing their mind. They are therefore losing their power, and will, in the course of time, begin to lose ground; but if you, in the mean time, are turning the full power of your mind to good account, you will not only gain more power, but you will soon begin to gain ground. You will gain and continue to gain in the long run, while others who have been misusing their minds will lose mostly everything in the long run. That is how you are going to win, and win splendidly regardless of ill treatment or opposition.”

Christian D. Larson (1874–1962) Prolific author of metaphysical and New Thought books

Source: Your Forces and How to Use Them (1912), Chapter 3, p. 50

Time

“Open your grief-stricken heart to the Lord. Weep and sincerely pray, 'O Lord, draw me towards You; give me peace of mind.' By doing so constantly you, will gradually attain peace of mind.”

Sarada Devi (1853–1920) Hindu religious figure, spiritual consort of Ramakrishna

Peace, Heart, Drawing, Sincerity

“A Man ought to form in his own Mind an exact and clear Idea of what Liberty is. Liberty is the Right of doing whatsoever the Laws allow: And if any one Citizen could do what the Laws forbid, there would be no more Liberty; because others would have an equal Power of doing the same.”

Catherine the Great (1729–1796) Empress of Russia

Item 38
Proposals for a New Law Code (1768)

Law, Idea

“It is conventional to refer to the United Nations in hushed tones of respect and awe, as if it were the repository of justice and equity, speaking almost with the voice of God if not yet acting with the power of God. It is no such thing. Despite the fair-seeming terminology of its charter and its declarations, the reality both of the Assembly and of the Security Council is a concourse of self-seeking nations, obeying their own prejudices and pursuing their own interests. They have not changed their individual natures by being aggregated with others in a system of bogus democracy…Does anybody seriously suppose that the members of the United Nations, or of the Security Council, have been actuated in their decisions on the Argentine invasion of the Falklands by a pure desire to see right done and wrong reversed? That was the last thing on their minds. Everyone of them, from the United States to Peru, calculated its own interests and consulted its own ambitions. What moral authority can attach a summation of self-interest and prejudice? I am not saying that nations ought not to pursue their own interests; they ought and, in any case, they will. What I am saying is that those interests are not sanctified by being tumbled into a mixer and shaken up altogether. An assembly of national spokesmen is not magically transmuted into a glorious company of saints and martyrs. Its only redeeming feature is its impotence…The United Nations is a colossal coating of humbug poured, like icing over a birthday cake, over the naked ambitions and hostilities of the nations.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

'We have the will, we don't need the humbug', The Times (12 June 1982), p. 12
1980s

God, Hostility, Justice, Democracy

“Outside the door a group of men stood whispering while the less solemn parts of the Mass were being said. These men stared about them at the rolling country of little hills and commented on the crops, the weather, the tombstones or whatever came into their dreaming minds.
'Very weedy piece of spuds, them of Mick Finnegan's.'
'He doesn't put on the dung, Larry: the man that doesn't drive on the dung won't take out a crop.' A pause, 'Nothing like the dung.”

Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967) poet

p13
Prose, Tarry Flynn (1948)

Men, Dreams, Parting, Weather

“If Muslim people do not change their mind in spite of the changes of social conditions, and if we supplement Islamic courtesy and law without explaining and advertising real Islamic beliefs at the same time, then it is impossible to save the minds of the people.”

Ma Fuxiang (1876–1932) Chinese politician

The completion of the idea of dual loyalty towards China and Islam, Masumi, Matsumoto, 2010-06-28 http://science-islam.net/article.php3?id_article=676&lang=fr,

People, Law, Change, Time

“A mind that has confronted ruin for years
Is half or more a ruined mind.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Given (2005), Sabbaths 2001