Archive

Quotes

Imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.

—Katherine Anne Porter, 1949

Brain, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

The brain is an unreliable organ, it is monstrously great, monstrously developed. Swollen, like a goiter.

—Aleksandr Blok, c. 1920

Don’t lose your mind unless you have paid for it.

—Stanisław Jerzy Lec, 1957

From a man’s face, I can read his character. If I can see him walk, I know his thoughts.

—Gaius Petronius Arbiter, c. 60

What 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

Your mind’s got to eat, too.

—Dambudzo Marechera, 1978

Sooner 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, 1930

Sanity is madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.

—George Santayana, 1920

my mind is
a big hunk of irrevocable nothing

—E.E. Cummings, 1923

Every thought is, strictly speaking, an afterthought.

—Hannah Arendt, 1978

What a torture to talk to filled heads that allow nothing from the outside to enter them.

—Joseph Joubert, 1807

“I think, therefore I am” is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.

—Milan Kundera, 1990