Quotes about mind (10000 quotes, page 99)

Speech https://www.theguardian.com/education/thegreatdebate/story/0,,574645,00.html to Ruskin College, Oxford University (18 October 1976)
Prime Minister

School , Home , Understanding , Children

“Are the gods mad or are they so subtle we cannot fathom the workings of their minds?”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Source: Book 3, Chapter 4 “What the Sea God Said” (p. 554), The Elric Cycle, Stormbringer (1965)

God , Madness

“Despairingly, sometimes, I seek the comfort of a benign god, Shaarilla. My mind goes out, lying awake at night, searching through black barrenness for something—anything—which will take me to it, warm me, protect me, tell me that there is order in the chaotic tumble of the universe; that it is consistent, this precision of the planets, not simply a brief, bright spark of sanity in an eternity of malevolent anarchy.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Elric sighed and his quiet tones were tinged with hopelessness. “Without some confirmation of the order of things, my only comfort is to accept the anarchy. This way, I can revel in chaos and know, without fear, that we are doomed from the start—that our brief existence is both meaningless and damned. I can accept, then, that we are more than forsaken, because there was never anything there to forsake us. I have weighed the proof, Shaarilla, and must believe that anarchy prevails, in spite of all the laws which seemingly govern our actions, our sorcery, our logic. I see only chaos in the world. If the book we seek tells me otherwise, then I shall gladly believe it. Until then, I will put my trust only in my sword and myself.”
Source: The Elric Cycle, The Weird of the White Wolf (1977), Chapter 1, “A Woman Who Would Risk Grief to Her Soul” (p. 451)

God , Night , Search , Universe

“This was Elric’s dream, more coherent now than it had ever been. This was his dream and it was why he traveled the world, why he refused the power which was his, why he risked his life, his mind, his love and everything else he valued, for he believed that there was no life worth living that was not risked in pursuit of knowledge and justice. And this was why his fellow countrymen feared him. Justice was not obtained, he believed, by administration but by experience. One must know what it was to suffer humiliation and powerlessness; at least to some degree, before one could entirely appreciate its effect. One must give up power if one was to achieve true justice. This was not the logic of Empire, but it was the logic of one who truly loved the world and desired to see an age dawn when all people would be free to pursue their ambitions in dignity and self-respect.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Book 1, Chapter 3 “On the Red Road” (p. 160)
The Elric Cycle, The Fortress of the Pearl (1989)

Fear , Justice , Dreams , Suffering

“The albino reflected on the power of the human mind to build a fantasy and then defend it with complete determination as a reality.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Book 1, Chapter 2 “The Pearl at the Heart of the World” (p. 139)
The Elric Cycle, The Fortress of the Pearl (1989)

Reality

“The world which lay under darkness and stillness following the closing of the lid was not the world we know. The event was over. Its devastation lay around about us. The clamoring mind and heart stilled, almost indifferent, certainly disembodied, frail, and exhausted. The hills were hushed, obliterated. Up in the sky, like a crater from some distant cataclysm, was a hollow ring.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

" Total Eclipse https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/annie-dillards-total-eclipse/536148/", Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982)

World , Indifference , Distant , Heart

“According to what I’ve been able to find out so far, there must have been something like fifty thousand. Mind you, too many. Even if the action was morally justified. I’m not trying to minimize things; I’m trying to bring them back to reality—there’s quite a difference between fifty thousand and three million.”

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1928–1979) Fourth President and ninth Prime Minister of Pakistan

Oriana Fallaci. Interview with Ali Bhutto in Karachi, April 1972

Reality

“For me being an American is an attitude, a state of mind.”

Sebastian Gorka (1970) American politician

The War for America's Soul, ISBN 978-1-62157-940-3

“It is useless to talk of a democracy as long as this kind of prejudice (untouchability) sways our mind and influences our conduct towards those from whom we differ in religion or whose forms of occupation we dislike. … The process of building a nation is a moral process. You cannot engage in work of this kind with success by practicing duplicity. … It is sufficiently humiliating that we should have to mention untouchability at all in our programme; but to have avoided it for fear of offending the sensibilities of some classes of our countrymen would have been even worse. It would have been immoral.”

Lala Lajpat Rai (1865–1928) Indian author and politician

What India Owes Lala Lajpat Rai by Aravindan Neelakandan https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/what-india-owes-lala-lajpat-rai

Democracy , Fear , Religion , Success

“There is one point more which has been troubling me very much of late and one which I want you to think carefully and that is the question of Hindu-Mohamedan unity. I have devoted most of my time during the last six months to the study of Muslim history and Muslim Law and I am inclined to think, it is neither possible nor practicable. Assuming and admitting the sincerity of the Mohamedan leaders in the Non-cooperation movement, I think their religion provides an effective bar to anything of the kind. You remember the conversation, I reported to you in Calcutta, which I had with Hakim Ajmalkhan and Dr. Kitchlew. There is no finer Mohamedan in Hindustan than Hakimsaheb but can any other Muslim leader override the Quran? I can only hope that my reading of Islamic Law is incorrect, and nothing would relieve me more than to be convinced that it is so. But if it is right then it comes to this that although we can unite against the British we cannot do so to rule Hindustan on British lines, we cannot do so to rule Hindustan on democratic lines. What is then the remedy? I am not afraid of seven crores in Hindustan but I think the seven crores of Hindustan plus the armed hosts of Afghanistan, Central Asia, Arabia, Mesopotamia and Turkey will be irresistible. I do honestly and sincerely believe in the necessity or desirability of Hindu-Muslim unity. I am also fully prepared to trust the Muslim leaders, but what about the injunctions of the Quran and Hadis? The leaders cannot override them. Are we then doomed? I hope not. I hope learned mind and wise head will find some way out of this difficulty.”

Lala Lajpat Rai (1865–1928) Indian author and politician

in B.R. Ambedkar, Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)

Religion , Study , History , Law

“And what is this bill? This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.”

Smedley D. Butler book War Is a Racket

War is a racket (1935)

Home , Heart

“There never, gentlemen, was a period in which the steadfastness of some men has been nut to so sore a trial. It is not very difficult for well-formed minds to abandon their interest; but the separation of fame and virtue is an harsh divorce. Liberty is in danger of being made unpopular to Englishmen. Contending for an imaginary power, we begin to acquire the spirit of domination, and to lose the relish of honest equality.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777)

Men

“Strangely, he wasn’t scared at all. He was even more coldly calm, calmly analytical. And he knew that he would have to be if he was to stand a chance to win this war. If he was to win it, his mind would have to be his major weapon; firearms might win a battle, but never the war.”

Fredric Brown book The Mind Thing

Source: The Mind Thing (1961), Chapter 18 (p. 555)

War , Chance

“I sought her in the grayness and she wasn’t there, she was dead and she wasn’t there, she wouldn’t be there ever again and I could never find comfort in her again. Ellen, beloved, you are dead and your voice is in my mind and only in my mind.”

Fredric Brown book The Lights in the Sky Are Stars

Source: The Lights in the Sky Are Stars (1953), Chapter 3, “1999” (p. 233)

Dead

“By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have.”

Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) Novelist, screenwriter

In a letter to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly. [Hiney, Tom, Frank MacShane, 2000, The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959, New York, Atlantic Monthly Press, p. 77, ISBN 0871137860]

Way , Perfection , God , Reading

“Many Americans share the feeling that our society has forgotten how to mind its own business.”

Michael Nava (1954) American writer

Source: Non-fiction, Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994), p.141

Business , Feeling

“We promise God that the dog…Bush will not enjoy peace of mind and that his army will not have a good life as long as our hearts are beating.”

Abu Musab Zarqawi (1966–2006) Jordanian jihadist

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in quotes https://www.irishtimes.com/news/abu-musab-al-zarqawi-in-quotes-1.786124 The Irish Times (29th April 2005)

God , Peace , Dogs , Heart

“When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

"The core of the teachings (1980) http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/about-krishnamurti/dissolution-speech.php
1980s

Past , Time

“How can even the lowest mind, if he reflects at all the marvels of this earth and sky, the brilliant fashioning of plants and animals, remain blind to the fact that this wonderful world with its settled order must have a maker to design, determine and direct it?”

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111) Persian Muslim theologian, jurist, philosopher, and mystic

Tibawi, A.L. (ed. and tr.). (1965) Al-Risala al-Qudsiyya (The Jerusalem Epistle) “Al-Ghazali's Tract on Dogmatic Theology”. In: The Islamic Quarterly, 9:3–4 (1965), 3-4.

World , Animals , Fashion

“Is the Iraqi state succeeding? I think there are some prospects for this country to be moving in the right direction. But the legacies of the past, the problems are really, really monumental… We need to deliver. Otherwise we will not be able to justify what we do in the eyes of our public. And public opinion does matter in Iraq. People speak their minds. People are engaged, are interested… Life is coming back… Every time I go out of the presidential palace in Baghdad — and I do try to go out as often as I can — I do see normalcy coming back, more and more. I do think there is a window of opportunity — it should be cherished. We’ve not had it like this for a long, long time… It’s precious, but precarious.”

Barham Salih (1960) President of Iraq

As quoted in "Iraq’s president explains why the U.S. must reengage with Baghdad" https://web.archive.org/web/20190320221430/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/03/20/iraqs-president-explains-why-us-must-reengage-with-baghdad/?utm_term=.400c91bdd2cf (20 March 2019), by Christian Caryl, The Washington Post
2010s

Time , Country , Past , People

“Tell me what to avoid, what to seek, by what studies to strengthen my tottering mind, how I may rebuff the waves that strike me abeam and drive me from my course, by what means I may be able to cope with all my evils, and by what means I can be rid of the calamities that have plunged in upon me and those into which I myself have plunged. Teach me how to bear the burden of sorrow without a groan on my part, and how to bear prosperity without making others groan; also, how to avoid waiting for the ultimate and inevitable end, and to beat a retreat of my own free will, when it seems proper to me to do so.”

Seneca the Younger book Epistulae morales ad Lucilium

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter CXVI: On Real Ethics as Superior to Syllogistic Subtleties

Study , Waiting , Evil , Making love

“It is generally agreed that no activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied – not rhetoric or liberal studies – since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it.”

Seneca the Younger book Epistulae morales ad Lucilium

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XLIX: On the Shortness of Life

Study

“You must lay aside the burdens of the mind; until you do this, no place will satisfy you.”

Seneca the Younger book Epistulae morales ad Lucilium

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XXVIII: On travel as a cure for discontent

“Armies have endured all manner of want, have lived on roots, and have resisted hunger by means of food too revolting to mention. All this they have suffered to gain a kingdom, and—what is more marvellous—to gain a kingdom that will be another’s. Will any man hesitate to endure poverty, in order that he may free his mind from madness?”

Seneca the Younger book Epistulae morales ad Lucilium

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XVII: On Philosophy and Riches

Hunger , Madness , Suffering , Food

“The primary indication, to my thinking, of a well-ordered mind is a man’s ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company.”

Seneca the Younger book Epistulae morales ad Lucilium

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter II: On discursiveness in reading

Thinking

“If we are willing to make such efforts in order to understand foreign cultures, unknown species and distant planets, it might be worth working just as hard in order to understand our own minds. And we had better understand our minds before the algorithms make our minds up for us.”

Yuval Noah Harari book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Distant , Making love , Understanding , Effort

“The typical scientist doesn’t actually practise meditation herself. Rather, she invites experienced meditators to her laboratory, covers their heads with electrodes, asks them to meditate, and observes the resulting brain activities. That can teach us many interesting things about the brain, but if the aim is to understand the mind, we are missing some of the most important insights.”

Yuval Noah Harari book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Understanding

“There have been many legends invented about Charlemagne, but he was no legend. Out of the shattered ruins of the ancient world he built the modern world, and even now reflection on his feat quickens the pulse. It was an achievement as daring as any long transoceanic flight of our day, but it called also for endurance lasting not hours but decades, and for adventure of the mind as well as of the body; a vast new political trajectory was described as well as a military one.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

"The Necessity and Grandeur of the International Ideal," in Woman as Artist and Thinker, Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005.

World

“I believe the British government forms the best model the world ever produced, and such has been its progress in the minds of the many, that this truth gradually gains ground. This government has for its object public strength and individual security.”

Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804) Founding Father of the United States

It is said with us to be unattainable. All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government. Can a democratic assembly, who annually revolve in the mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good?
Farrand's Records of the Federal Convention, v. 1, p. 299. (June 19, 1787)
Debates of the Federal Convention (1787)

World , Truth

“Before the spirit could seek into it, the mind must. She studied the tensor equations as once she studied the sutras, she meditated upon the koans of science, and at last she began to feel her oneness with all that was, and in the vision find peace.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 19 “Thule”, Section 18 (p. 449)

Science , Peace , Study , Feeling

“Think. You have had your dealings with our bureaucracy. It is impossible not to, especially if one is a foreigner. Believe me, when we set our minds to it we can tangle, obstruct, and bring to a dead halt a herd of stampeding elephants.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 16 “Niche” (p. 291)

Thinking , Dead

“Meister Eckhart, the German churchman and mystic of the fourteenth century; Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in the fifteenth; Jacob Boehme, a German, in the sixteenth and seventeenth; Emanuel Swedenborg in the seventeenth and eighteenth. We are spiritually free, they said, the stewards of our own evolution. Humankind has a choice. We can awaken to our true nature. Drawing fully from our inner resources we can achieve a new dimension of mind; we can see more.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Two, Premonitions of Transformation and Conspiracy

Drawing , Nature

“The premonition was recorded, from time to time, that a minority of individuals would someday be yeast enough to leaven a whole society. Serving as a magnet culture, they would attract order around them, transforming the whole. The central idea was always the same: Only through a new mind can humanity remake itself, and the potential for such a new mind is natural.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Two, Premonitions of Transformation and Conspiracy

Idea , Time , Nature

“When you understand the basic change taking place in any one major area, it is easier to make sense of the others. This discovery of a new pattern transcends explanation. The shift is qual-itative, sudden, the result of neurological processes too rapid and complex to be tracked by the conscious mind. Although logical explanations can be laid out up to a point, the seeing of a pattern is not sequential but all-at-once. If a new concept does not click into place for you on first encounter, read on. As you move through the book you will come upon many related ideas, connections, examples, metaphors, analogies, and illustrative stories. In time, patterns will emerge, the shifts will occur. From the new perspective, old questions may seem suddenly irrelevant.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter One, The Conspiracy

Time , Reading , Understanding , Question

“Broader than reform, deeper than revolution, this benign conspiracy for a new human agenda has triggered the most rapid cultural realignment in history. The great shuddering, irrevocable shift overtaking us is not a new political, religious, or philosophical system. It is a new mind — the ascendance of a startling worldview that gathers into its framework breakthrough science and insights from earliest recorded thought. The Aquarian Conspirators range across all levels of income and education, from the humblest to the highest. The Aquarian Conspirators range across all levels of income and education, from the humblest to the highest. There are schoolteachers and office workers, famous scientists, government officials and lawmakers, artists and millionaires, taxi drivers and celebrities, leaders in medicine, education, law, psychology. Some are open in their advocacy, and their names may be familiar. Others are quiet about their involvement, believing they can be more effective if they are not identified with ideas that have all too often been misunderstood.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter One, The Conspiracy

Science , History , Law , Education

“I am an Arab and Arab minded person, but I am not a racist, a Shiite, but I am not sectarian.”

Ayad Allawi (1945) Iraqi politician

24 December 2017 http://www.alriyadh.com/1648994#

Personality

“The powers of the mind should be concentrated and the mind turned back upon itself; as the darkest places reveal their secrets before the penetrating rays of the sun, so will the concentrated mind penetrate its own innermost secrets.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Sun , Secret

“The highest truth is this: God is present in all beings. They are His multiple forms. There is no other God to seek.... It is a man-making religion that we want.... Give up these weakening mysticisms, and be strong.... For the next fifty years. … let all other gods disappear from our minds. This is the only God that is awake, our own race, everywhere His hands, everywhere His feet, everywhere His ears; He covers everything.... The first of all worships is the worship of those all around us. … He alone serves God who serves all other beings.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Quoted from Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage.

God , Religion , Strong , Truth

“I meet amateur composers all the time who have music flooding through their heads, apparently, but they have no technical ability at all. They don’t actually have the faintest idea how to put it down on the page. These days you can actually get away with that, because you sort of mess around and track it, and all those things. But to my mind, that balance between the excitement of what is called inspiration or just simply a good idea, and the technical routine that goes into writing music down at all, is what makes a composer. You can’t have one without the other and be a complete composer. I can’t imagine how you could.”

Richard Rodney Bennett (1936–2012) English composer and pianist

Time , Imagination , Music , Idea

“We are determined to protect our freedom of speech and the right to speak our minds without fear of the politically correct thought-police knocking on our doors.”

Gerard Batten (1954) British politician

UKIP aiming to be 'radical, populist' party - Gerard Batten https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-45593648 BBC News (21 September 2018)
2018

Fear , Freedom

“After winning the final battle, when the Muslims rushed violently, like a stormy wind, through Sindh, they went on beheading these Buddhists even more ruthlessly than they did the Vedic Hindus. For, the Vedic Hindus were fighting in groups or individually at every place and so they struck at least a little awe and terror in the minds of the Muslims. But as there was no armed opposition in Buddhist Vihars and Buddhist localities, the Muslims cut them down as easily as they would cut vegetable.”

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) Indian pro-independence activist,lawyer, politician, poet, writer and playwright

V.D. Savarkar: Six glorious Epochs, p.136. (-: Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History. Veer Savarkar Prakashan, Bombay 1985 (1963).)

Fight

“Never mind what others may say, or think, or do. Stand erect in the majesty of your own manhood. Listen for just once to the throbbing of your own heart, and you will hear that it is beating quickstep marches to Camp Freedom. Stand erect! Lift your bowed form from the earth! The dust has long enough borne the impress of your knees. Stand up and see how long a shadow you cast in the sunlight! Hold up your head and avow your convictions, and then accept, as becomes a man, the consequences of your acts!”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

"Industrial Unionism" (1905), Eugene Debs Speaks

Thinking , Heart , Freedom

“It is with this in mind that the Republic of Haiti wishes greater consideration to be given to the repeated demands of the Republic of China for participation in the activities of the United Nations system.”

Bocchit Edmond Haitian politician

Bocchit Edmond (2019) cited in: " 11 of Taiwan's allies speak up at UN debate: MOFA http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aipl/201909290006.aspx" in Focus Taiwan, 29 September 2019.
Statement made during the General Debate of the 74th general assembly of the United Nations, 28 September 2019.

“Vasyl was supposed to become my vocal adviser in my future project. For three years Slipak was a soloist at the Grand Opera. He got solo parts, but he also wanted to have concert practice, that is why he chose a sort of freelance. Mind you, when the war in the east of Ukraine broke out, his vocal career was on the rise. Characteristically, Vasyl did not give up his career, he would be active as a volunteer, then he would return from Ukraine to France to give concerts and appear in performances, and then again he would go to Ukraine, which he loved above all. And then again more concerts, and again back to the front.”

Vasyl Slipak (1974–2016) Ukrainian opera singer

2017
Nicolas Krauze, conductor, the Orchestre de Chambre Nouvelle Europe (France). “He loved Ukraine above all”. The Day. Кyiv.ua. - 2017. - 7 March. https://day.kyiv.ua/en/article/culture/he-loved-ukraine-above-all

War , Future , Appearance , Love

“In a time of crisis, with grave questions demanding urgent answer at every moment, no body of men would dare claim to be judged infallible. There was indeed no clear way, but almost always a hideous choice of evils. I can only know, for myself, that my mind will be at rest for having taken no decision inconsistent with what on all the facts I felt right.”

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax (1881–1959) British politician

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1938/oct/03/international-relations#column_1308 in the House of Lords (3 October 1938) on the Munich Agreement
Foreign Secretary

Time , Question , Decision , Way

“It is patent to every student of the closing forty years of the last century, that crowds of thoughtful and moral people have slipped away from the churches, because the teachings they received there outraged their intelligence and shocked their moral sense. It is idle to pretend that the widespread agnosticism of this period had its root either in lack of morality or in deliberate crookedness of mind. Everyone who carefully studies the phenomena presented will admit that men of strong intellect have been driven out of Christianity by the crudity of the religious ideas set before them, the contradictions in the authoritative teachings, the views as to God, man, and the universe that no trained intelligence could possibly admit. Nor can it be said that any kind of moral degradation lay at the root of the revolt against the dogmas of the Church. The rebels were not too bad for their religion; on the contrary, it was the religion that was too bad for them. The rebellion against popular Christianity was due to the awakening and the growth of conscience; it was the conscience that revolted, as well as the intelligence, against teachings dishonouring to God and man alike, that represented God as a tyrant, and man as essentially evil, gaining salvation by slavish submission.”

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

Esoteric Christianity (The Lesser Mysteries) (1914)

God , Religion , Study , Strong

“First he must gain control over his thoughts, the progeny of the restless, unruly mind, hard to curb as the wind. (Bhagavad Gitâ, vi. 34). Steady, daily practice in meditation, in concentration, had begun to reduce this mental rebel to order ere he entered on the probationary Path, and the disciple now works with concentrated energy to complete the task, knowing that the great increase in thought power that will accompany his rapid growth will prove a danger both to others and to himself unless the developing force be thoroughly under his control. Better give a child dynamite as a plaything, than place the creative powers of thought in the hands of the selfish and ambitious.”

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

The Ageless Wisdom (1897)

Selfishness

“The main preparation to be made for receiving in the physical vehicle the vibrations of the higher consciousness are: its purification from grosser materials by pure food and pure life; the entire subjugation of the passions, and the cultivation of an even, balanced temper and mind, unaffected by the turmoil and vicissitudes of external life; the habit of quiet meditation on lofty topics, turning the mind away from the objects of the senses, and from the mental images arising from them, and fixing it on higher things; the cessation of hurry, especially of that restless, excitable hurry of the mind, which keeps the brain continually at work and flying from one subject to another; the genuine love for the things of the higher world, that makes them more attractive than the objects of the lower, so that the mind rests contentedly in their companionship as in that of a well-loved friend.”

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

The Ageless Wisdom (1897)

Food , Flying , Sense , Passion

“The habit of quiet, sustained, and sequential thought, directed to non-worldly subjects, of meditation, of study, develops the mind-body and renders it a better instrument; the effort to cultivate abstract thinking is also useful, as this raises the lower mind towards the higher, and draws into it the subtlest materials of the lower mental plane.”

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

The Ageless Wisdom (1897)

Drawing , Thinking , Study , Effort

“The average African-American family in this country making $100,000, which is, you know, decent money, actually lives in the same kind of neighborhood that the average white family making $35,000 a year lives in. That is totally tied to the legacy of enslavement and Jim Crow and the input and the idea in the mind that white people and black people are somehow deserving of different things.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975) writer, journalist, and educator

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Reparations Are Not Just About Slavery But Also Centuries of Theft & Racial Terror, Democracy Now (20 June 2019)

Money , Family , Country , People

“What the poet has in mind... is that poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of imagination. The poet tries to exemplify it, in part as I have tried to exemplify it here, by identifying it with an imaginative activity that diffuses itself throughout our lives.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value

Knowledge , Faith , Imagination , Parting

“I feel assured in my mind that your personality will help to soothe the injured souls and bring peace and unity into an atmosphere of mistrust and chaos.”

Rajendra Prasad (1884–1963) Indian political leader

Rabindranath Tagore in appreciation of his efforts to heal the rift between Gandhi and Subashchandra Bose due to ideological differences. He was elected President of the National Congress.
First Citizen

Peace , Soul , Personality , Help

“The last thing I would say is that you can achieve a lot of things in politics and get a lot of things done; in the end, public service and the national interest is what it is all about. Nothing is really impossible if you put your mind to it. After all, as I once said, I was the future once.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Last statement to the House of Commons as Prime Minister, ending by paraphrasing his 2005 comment to Tony Blair, "he was the future once" (July 13, 2016), see Hansard https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2016-07-13/debates/4A1B874C-54B5-4BEF-8D79-AFA264A78068/Engagements#contribution-E7A04179-9154-4077-87DF-1642C1BD3B4D
2010s, 2016

Future

“Let the first rule of right prayer then be, to have our heart and mind framed as becomes those who are entering into converse with God. This we shall accomplish in regard to the mind, if, laying aside carnal thoughts and cares which might interfere with the direct and pure contemplation of God, it not only be wholly intent on prayer, but also, as far as possible, be borne and raised above itself. … When I say it must be raised above itself, I mean that it must not bring into the presence of God any of those things which our blind and stupid reason is wont to devise, nor keep itself confined within the little measure of its own vanity, but rise to a purity worthy of God.”

John Calvin book Institutes of the Christian Religion

Book 3, Chapter 20, Section 4
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

God , Heart , Stupidity

“Some one will say, Does he not know without a monitor both what our difficulties are, and what is meet for our interest, so that it seems in some measure superfluous to solicit him by our prayers, as if he were winking, or even sleeping, until aroused by the sound of our voice? Those who argue thus attend not to the end for which the Lord taught us to pray. It was not so much for his sake as for ours. … It is very much for our interest to be constantly supplicating him; first, that our heart may always be inflamed with a serious and ardent desire of seeking, loving and serving him, while we accustom ourselves to have recourse to him as a sacred anchor in every necessity; secondly, that no desires, no longing whatever, of which we are ashamed to make him the witness, may enter our minds, while we learn to place all our wishes in his sight, and thus pour out our heart before him; and, lastly, that we may be prepared to receive all his benefits with true gratitude and thanksgiving, while our prayers remind us that they proceed from his hand.”

John Calvin book Institutes of the Christian Religion

Book 3, Chapter 20, Section 3
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

Sleep , Gratitude , Heart , Learning

“Few men have had their elasticity so thoroughly put to the proof as Caesar-- the sole creative genius produced by Rome, and the last produced by the ancient world, which accordingly moved on in the path that he marked out for it until its sun went down. Sprung from one of the oldest noble families of Latium--which traced back its lineage to the heroes of the Iliad and the kings of Rome, and in fact to the Venus-Aphrodite common to both nations--he spent the years of his boyhood and early manhood as the genteel youth of that epoch were wont to spend them. He had tasted the sweetness as well as the bitterness of the cup of fashionable life, had recited and declaimed, had practised literature and made verses in his idle hours, had prosecuted love-intrigues of every sort, and got himself initiated into all the mysteries of shaving, curls, and ruffles pertaining to the toilette-wisdom of the day, as well as into the still more mysterious art of always borrowing and never paying. But the flexible steel of that nature was proof against even these dissipated and flighty courses; Caesar retained both his bodily vigour and his elasticity of mind and of heart unimpaired. In fencing and in riding he was a match for any of his soldiers, and his swimming saved his life at Alexandria; the incredible rapidity of his journeys, which usually for the sake of gaining time were performed by night--a thorough contrast to the procession-like slowness with which Pompeius moved from one place to another-- was the astonishment of his contemporaries and not the least among the causes of his success. The mind was like the body. His remarkable power of intuition revealed itself in the precision and practicability of all his arrangements, even where he gave orders without having seen with his own eyes. His memory was matchless, and it was easy for him to carry on several occupations simultaneously with equal self-possession. Although a gentleman, a man of genius, and a monarch, he had still a heart. So long as he lived, he cherished the purest veneration for his worthy mother Aurelia (his father having died early); to his wives and above all to his daughter Julia he devoted an honourable affection, which was not without reflex influence even on political affairs. With the ablest and most excellent men of his time, of high and of humbler rank, he maintained noble relations of mutual fidelity, with each after his kind. As he himself never abandoned any of his partisans after the pusillanimous and unfeeling manner of Pompeius, but adhered to his friends--and that not merely from calculation--through good and bad times without wavering, several of these, such as Aulus Hirtius and Gaius Matius, gave, even after his death, noble testimonies of their attachment to him.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol.4. Part 2.
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

Daughters , Self-confidence , Literature , Fashion

“Whatever may be the discoveries of the scientific mind, none can dispute the eternal truths propounded by the Upanishads. Though they may appear as riddles, the key to solving them lies in our heart and if one were to approach them with an open mind one could secure the treasure as did the Rishis of ancient times.”

Paul Deussen (1845–1919) German Orientalist and Sanskrit scholar

Indian Antiquary (1902) - By Paul Deussen and reprinted in Outline of Indian Philosophy - 1907.

Heart , Truth , Appearance , Time

“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) Jewish-American political theorist

The New York Review of Books interview with the French writer Roger Errera (1978)

History , Dependency , People , Nature

“Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome. Every beginning is cheerful: the threshold is the place of expectation. The boy stands astonished, his impressions guide him: he learns sportfully, seriousness comes on him by surprise. Imitation is born with us: what should be imitated is not easy to discover. The excellent is rarely found, more rarely valued. The height charms us, the steps to it do not: with the summit in our eye, we love to walk along the plain. It is but a part of art that can be taught: the artist needs it all. Who knows it half, speaks much, and is always wrong: who knows it wholly, inclines to act, and speaks seldom or late. The former have no secrets and no force : the instruction they can give is like baked bread, savory and satisfying for a single day; but flour cannot be sown, and seed-corn ought not to be ground. Words are good, but they are not the best. The best is not to be explained by words. The spirit in which we act is the highest matter. Action can be understood and again represented by the spirit alone. No one knows what he is doing while he acts aright, but of what is wrong we are always conscious. Whoever works with symbols only is a pedant, a hypocrite, or a bungler. There are many such, and they like to be together. Their babbling detains the scholar: their obstinate mediocrity vexes even the best. The instruction which the true artist gives us opens the mind; for, where words fail him, deeds speak. The true scholar learns from the known to unfold the unknown, and approaches more and more to being a master.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Book VII Chapter IX
Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre (Journeyman Years) (1821–1829)

Learning , Boy , Art , Thinking

“Repression invades the academic enterprise itself, even prior to all restrictions on academic freedom. The pre-empting of the mind vitiates impartiality and objectivity: unless the student learns to think in the opposite direction, he will be inclined to place the facts into the predominant framework of values. Scholarship, i. e., the acquisition and communication of knowledge, prohibits the purification and isolation of facts from the context of the whole truth. An essential part of the latter is recognition of the frightening extent to which history is made and recorded by and for the victors, that is, the extent to which history was the development of oppression. And this oppression is in the facts themselves which it establishes; thus they themselves carry a negative value as part and aspect of their facticity. To treat the great crusades against humanity (like that against the Albigensians) with the same impartiality as the desperate struggles for humanity means neutralizing their opposite historical function, reconciling the executioners with their victims, distorting the record. Such spurious neutrality serves to reproduce acceptance of the dominion of the victors in the consciousness of man.”

Herbert Marcuse Repressive Tolerance

Repressive Tolerance (1965)

History , Freedom , Learning , Communication

“If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills, you’re out of your mind. There are more kicks the fuck to be had in a good case of paralytic polio or by living in an iron lung. If you think you need stuff to play music or sing, you’re crazy. It can fix you so you can’t play nothing or sing nothing.”

Billie Holiday book Lady Sings the Blues

Source: Lady Sings the Blues (1956), Ch. 23.

Music , Singing , Thinking

“There was a considerable time lag between the subordination of women in patriarchal society and the declassing of the goddesses. As we trace below changes in the position of male and female god figures in the pantheon of the gods in a period of over a thousand years, we should keep in mind that the power of the goddesses and their priestesses in daily life and in popular religion continued in force, even as the supreme goddesses were dethroned. It is remarkable that in societies which had subordinated women economically, educationally, and legally, the spiritual and metaphysical power of goddesses remained active and strong.”

Gerda Lerner (1920–2013) Austrian-American women's history scholar

The Creation of Patriarchy, ch. 7, pp. 141-142
The Creation of Patriarchy (1986)

God , Religion , Time , Strong