Imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.

—Katherine Anne Porter, 1949

As is the face, so is the mind.

—Roman proverb

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

—George Santayana, 1920

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

—Charles Darwin, 1871

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

Strength of mind is exercise, not rest.

—Alexander Pope, 1733

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

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1864

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

Don’t lose your mind unless you have paid for it.

—Stanisław Jerzy Lec, 1957

Is there no way out of the mind?

—Sylvia Plath, 1962

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.

—B.F. Skinner, 1969

Every thought is, strictly speaking, an afterthought.

—Hannah Arendt, 1978

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

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841

The march of the human mind is slow.

—Edmund Burke, 1775

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

—William Shakespeare, 1603

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

—Henry Ward Beecher, 1887

“I think, therefore I am” is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.

—Milan Kundera, 1990

We need strength, we need energy, we need quickness, and we need brain in this country to turn it around.

—Donald Trump, 2015

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

—Steve Biko, 1971

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

—Jane Austen, 1815

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

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

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

In psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

—Theodor Adorno, 1951

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

—R.D. Laing, 1967

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

—Joseph Joubert, 1807

The sleep of reason produces monsters.

—Francisco Goya, 1799

Your mind’s got to eat, too.

—Dambudzo Marechera, 1978

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

—Santiago Ramón y Cajal, 1897

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

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

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

—Aleksandr Blok, c. 1920

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

Brains are the only things worth having in this world.

—L. Frank Baum, 1899

Understanding is a very dull occupation.

—Gertrude Stein, 1937

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

—Margaret Fuller, 1844

Not all heads have a brain.

—French proverb

From a man’s face, I can read his character. If I can see him walk, I know his thoughts.

—Petronius, c. 60

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

The mind of man is capable of anything.

—Guy de Maupassant, 1884

The human mind is an evolutionary product, just like the human body.

—Tetsuro Matsuzawa, 2010