Mind Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit. It is never a narrowing of the mind or a restriction of the human spirit or the country's spirit.

Jawaharlal Nehru

There isn't a wife in the world who has not taken the exact measure of her husband, weighed him and settled him in her own mind, and knows him as well as if she had ordered him after designs and specifications of her own.

Charles Dudley Warner

Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Moral cowardice that keeps us from speaking our minds is as dangerous to this country as irresponsible talk. The right way is not always the popular and easy way. Standing for right when it is unpopular is a true test of moral character.

Margaret Chase Smith

I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of first introducing it into minds which were ignorant of its charms.

Giacomo Casanova

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities — the political, the religious, the educational authorities — who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing — forming in our minds — their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself.

Distinction is the consequence, never the object of a great mind.

Washington Allston

I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

John Maynard Keynes

We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye...The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

Jacob Bronowski

Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.

Knowledge is not a passion from without the mind, but an active exertion of the inward strength, vigour and power of the mind, displaying itself from within.

Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. Thoughts are things! And powerful things at that, when mixed with definiteness of purpose, and burning desire, can be translated into riches. Use auto-suggestion, have faith, imagination and overcome fear and time is your opposite player as in checkerboard.

Men may be spoiled by education, even as they are spoiled by illiteracy. Education is the preparation of the mind for future work, hence men should be educated with special reference to the work.

Timothy Thomas Fortune

The will is never free — it is always attached to an object, a purpose. It is simply the engine in the car — it can't steer. It is the mind, the reason, the imagination that steers.

Art does not, like science, set forth a permanent order of nature, the enduring skeleton of law. Two factors primarily determine its works: one is the idea in the mind of the artist, the other is his power of expression; and both these factors are extremely variable.

George Edward Woodberry

True enjoyment comes from activity of the mind and exercise of the body; the two are ever united.

Wilhelm von Humboldt

Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above them.

Washington Irving

Remember that faith and doubt cannot exist in the same mind at the same time, for one will dispel the other.

Thomas S. Monson