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Quotes

What is the hardest task in the world? To think.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841

To be too conscious is an illness—a real thoroughgoing illness.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1864

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

—Aleksandr Blok, c. 1920

Your mind’s got to eat, too.

—Dambudzo Marechera, 1978

Is there no way out of the mind?

—Sylvia Plath, 1962

Imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.

—Katherine Anne Porter, 1949

my mind is
a big hunk of irrevocable nothing

—E.E. Cummings, 1923

There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.

—Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1898

What is outside my mind means nothing to it.

—Marcus Aurelius, c. 170

The mind of man is capable of anything.

—Guy de Maupassant, 1884

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

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

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

—Jane Austen, 1815

The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

—Steve Biko, 1971