Archive

Quotes

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851

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

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

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

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1864

Every thought is, strictly speaking, an afterthought.

—Hannah Arendt, 1978

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

—Charles Darwin, 1871

The mind is not, I know, a highway but a temple, and its doors should not be carelessly left open.

—Margaret Fuller, 1844

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

—Jane Austen, 1815

Imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.

—Katherine Anne Porter, 1949

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.

—William Shakespeare, 1603

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

—Steve Biko, 1971

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

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841