“I think, therefore I am” is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
—Milan Kundera, 1990Quotes
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough.
—R.D. Laing, 1967What is outside my mind means nothing to it.
—Marcus Aurelius, c. 170The march of the human mind is slow.
—Edmund Burke, 1775What is the hardest task in the world? To think.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841As is the face, so is the mind.
—Roman proverbSooner or later if the activity of the mind is restricted anywhere, it will cease to function even where it is allowed to be free.
—Edith Hamilton, 1930The mind is not, I know, a highway but a temple, and its doors should not be carelessly left open.
—Margaret Fuller, 1844It is far, far better and much safer to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1958From a man’s face, I can read his character. If I can see him walk, I know his thoughts.
—Gaius Petronius Arbiter, c. 60The brain is an unreliable organ, it is monstrously great, monstrously developed. Swollen, like a goiter.
—Aleksandr Blok, c. 1920The universe is an object of thought at least as much as it is a means of satisfying needs.
—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1962What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1971