What is the hardest task in the world? To think.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841Quotes
To be too conscious is an illness—a real thoroughgoing illness.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1864The brain is an unreliable organ, it is monstrously great, monstrously developed. Swollen, like a goiter.
—Aleksandr Blok, c. 1920Your mind’s got to eat, too.
—Dambudzo Marechera, 1978Is there no way out of the mind?
—Sylvia Plath, 1962Imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.
—Katherine Anne Porter, 1949my mind is
a big hunk of irrevocable nothing
There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1898What is outside my mind means nothing to it.
—Marcus Aurelius, c. 170The mind of man is capable of anything.
—Guy de Maupassant, 1884Brain, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906A mind lively and at ease can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.
—Jane Austen, 1815The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
—Steve Biko, 1971