Archive

Quotes

If anything affects your eye, you hasten to have it removed; if anything affects your mind, you postpone the cure for a year.

—Horace, 20 BC

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

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

Your mind’s got to eat, too.

—Dambudzo Marechera, 1978

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough.

—R.D. Laing, 1967

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

—Charles Darwin, 1871

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

—George Santayana, 1920

Understanding is a very dull occupation.

—Gertrude Stein, 1937

Is there no way out of the mind?

—Sylvia Plath, 1962

The sleep of reason produces monsters.

—Francisco Goya, 1799

A mind lively and at ease can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.

—Jane Austen, 1815

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

my mind is
a big hunk of irrevocable nothing

—E.E. Cummings, 1923

The universe is an object of thought at least as much as it is a means of satisfying needs.

—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1962