Imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.
—Katherine Anne Porter, 1949Quotes
Brain, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906The brain is an unreliable organ, it is monstrously great, monstrously developed. Swollen, like a goiter.
—Aleksandr Blok, c. 1920Don’t lose your mind unless you have paid for it.
—Stanisław Jerzy Lec, 1957From a man’s face, I can read his character. If I can see him walk, I know his thoughts.
—Gaius Petronius Arbiter, c. 60What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1971Your mind’s got to eat, too.
—Dambudzo Marechera, 1978Sooner 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, 1930Sanity is madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
—George Santayana, 1920my mind is
a big hunk of irrevocable nothing
Every thought is, strictly speaking, an afterthought.
—Hannah Arendt, 1978What 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