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Quotes

Understanding is a very dull occupation.

—Gertrude Stein, 1937

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

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1864

Imagination is the secret and marrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith.

—Henry Ward Beecher, 1887

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

—Charles Darwin, 1871

The march of the human mind is slow.

—Edmund Burke, 1775

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

Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.

—Santiago Ramón y Cajal, 1897

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

—Joseph Joubert, 1807

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

—Jane Austen, 1815

Every thought is, strictly speaking, an afterthought.

—Hannah Arendt, 1978

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

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841

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

It is far, far better and much safer to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.

—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1958