Quotes about mind

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Variant: Life isn't as serious as the mind makes it out to be.
Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Often misquoted as: "I have found that most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." or "People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be."
This quote is not found in the various Lincoln sources which can be searched online (e.g. Gutenberg). Niether does Lincoln appear more generally to use the phrase "making up {one's} mind". The saying was first quoted, ascribed to Lincoln but with no source given, in 1914 by Frank Crane and several times subsequently by him in altered versions. It was later quoted in How to Get What You Want (1917) by Orison Swett Marden (Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1917), 74, again without source. Alternative versions quoted are: "I have found that most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be" and "People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be."


Source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/10/20/happy-minds/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CPeople%20are%20about%20as%20happy,up%20their%20minds%20to%20be.%E2%80%9D&text=Remember%20Lincoln's%20saying%20that%20%E2%80%9Cfolks,up%20their%20minds%20to%20be.%E2%80%9D

Curiously in later books Crane, e.g. Four Minute Essays, 1919, Adventures in Common Sense, 1920, "21", 1930, Crane mentions other routes to happiness and does not again use this quote.

Marden used a great many quotes in his writings, without giving sources. Whilst sources for many of the quotes can be found, this is not true for all. For instance he mentions another story in which Lincoln says "Madam, you have not a peg to hang your case on"; this also does not seem to found in Lincoln sources.

Source: Manifestoes of Surrealism

Source: Joining the Resistance

Source: Trickster's Choice

Source: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Source: Humboldt's Gift

Source: This Side of Paradise

Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Source: Oh, The Places You'll Go!

Source: Night Watch

Source: Odd John

Source: Small Favor

Source: Agnes Grey

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Source: The Power of Your Subconscious Mind

Source: A Strangeness in My Mind

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Variant: Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.
Source: Think and Grow Rich: A Black Choice

1951 - 1968, The Creative Act', 1957
Context: I want to clarify our understanding of the word 'art' – to be sure, without an attempt to a definition. What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way as a bad emotion is still an emotion.
Therefore, when I refer to 'art coefficient', it will be understood that I refer not only to great art, but I am trying to describe the subjective mechanism which produces art in a raw state – 'à l'état brute' – bad, good or indifferent.

Source: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Source: Pensées

Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

As A Man Thinketh (1902), Visions and Ideals
Context: In all human affairs there are efforts, and there are results, and the strength of the effort is the measure of the result. Chance is not. Gifts, powers, material, intellectual, and spiritual possessions are the fruits of effort; they are thoughts completed, objects accomplished, visions realized.
The Vision that you glorify in your mind, the Ideal that you enthrone in your heart — this you will build your life by, this you will become.

The Nome Trilogy (1989 - 1990)
Variant: The problem with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and putting things in it.
Source: Diggers (1990)

Source: Hogfather

"Carmel Point"
Context: Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. — As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

Source: Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

Source: Fourth Comings

Source: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Vol. 1

Source: Metaphysics: Concept and Problems

Source: Being Peace

5 December 1919
A Moment's Liberty (1990)
Source: A Writer's Diary
Context: This last week L. has been having a little temperature in the evening, due to malaria, and that due to a visit to Oxford; a place of death and decay. I'm almost alarmed to see how entirely my weight rests on his prop. And almost alarmed to see how intensely I'm specialised. My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child – wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.

Source: Dune

Source: Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential

Source: The Marriage Plot

Source: Speeches And Letters Of Abraham Lincoln, 1832 1865

Source: Of Mystics & Mistakes

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
Context: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Source: The Color of Magic

Source: Brisingr

Source: Unsourced

Source: Practicing the Power of Now: Essential Teachings, Meditations, and Exercises from the Power of Now

Source: The Years

Source: Metamorphoses

Source: The Golden Lily

Source: Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (1995), p. 8

Source: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

Source: Sigan Ŭn Hangsang Mirae Ro Hŭrŭnŭnʼga: Hokʻing Paksa Ŭi Chaemi Innŭn Chʻoesin Ujuron

Source: The Prince and the Pauper

Source: Practicing the Power of Now: Essential Teachings, Meditations, and Exercises from the Power of Now

Source: The Bell Jar

Source: Angel Words: Visual Evidence of How Words Can Be Angels in Your Life

Source: Hamlet

Birds (414 BC) <br class="br">Context: Informer: My friend, I am asking you for wings, not for words.<br>Pisthetaerus: It&#x27;s just my words that gives you wings.<br>Informer: And how can you give a man wings with your words?<br>Pisthetaerus: They all start this way. [... ]<br>Informer: So that words give wings?<br>Pisthetaerus: Undoubtedly; words give wings to the mind and make a man soar to heaven. Thus I hope that my wise words will give you wings to fly to some less degrading trade.<br>(tr. O&#x27;Neill 1938, Perseus http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Aristoph.+Birds+1436)

Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life (2002)

Source: Wintersmith