Human Mind Quotes

There's something about having an artistic outlet that is so important to the human mind and development. It's as important as any other subject in school. I think it should be mandatory. It's part of our genetic makeup. ~ Ingrid Michaelson

Very often, all the activity of the human mind is directed not in revealing the truth, but in hiding the truth ~ Leo Tolstoy

Though the structures and patterns of mathematics reflect the structure of, and resonate in, the human mind every bit as much as do the structures and patterns of music, human beings have developed no mathematical equivalent to a pair of ears. Mathematics can only be "seen" with the "eyes of the mind". It is as if we had no sense of hearing, so that only someone able to sight read music would be able to appreciate its patterns and harmonies. ~ Keith Devlin

We don't know why we are here and the context of our role in the universe, and the thought of an infinite universe. It's something the human mind can't really grasp. It's statistically impossible that there's not life on other planets. ~ Joel Kinnaman

The ultimate cause of human suffering is based on the internal structure of the mind. All causes of the discomfort and distress mainly come from the inner world. Given that the human brain is a necessary and sufficient cause of the human mind, in general, a person should begin with a reconfiguration of the brain if he or she wants to avoid all the sufferings in life. Remember that the brain is the ultimate cure for all suffering. ~ Elmar Hussein

Aristocracy naturally leads the human mind to the contemplation of the past, and fixes it there. Democracy, on the contrary, gives men a sort of instinctive distaste for what is ancient. In this respect aristocracy is far more favorable to poetry; for things commonly grow larger and more obscure as they are more remote; and, for this two-fold reason, they are better suited to the delineation of the ideal. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

You can mass-produce hardware; you cannot mass-produce software - you cannot mass-produce the human mind. ~ Michio Kaku

The original mistake, which was responsible for all this misery, was committed when our scientists began to create a new world of steel and iron and chemistry and electricity and forgot that the human mind is slower than the proverbial turtle, is lazier than the well-known sloth, and marches from one hundred to three hundred years behind the small group of courageous leaders. ~ Hendrik Willem Van Loon

The human mind gives color to the Earth's mind; the Earth's mind gives color to the human mind. ~ Ilchi Lee

Nobody, I believe, will deny, that we are to form our judgment of the true nature of the human mind, not from sloth and stupidity of the most degenerate and vilest of men, but from the sentiments and fervent desires of the best and wisest of the species. ~ Robert B. Leighton

In fact any good mind properly taught can think like Euclid and like Walt Whitman. The Renaissance, as we saw, was full of such minds, equally competent as poet and as engineers. The modern notion of "the two cultures," incompatible under one skull, comes solely from the proliferation of specialties in science; but these also divide scientists into groups that do not understand one another, the cause being the sheer mass of detail and the diverse terminologies. In essence the human mind remains one, not 2 or 60 different organs. ~ Jacques Barzun

This kind of pragmatism has become a hallmark of our psychological culture. In the mid-1990s, I described how it was commonplace for people to "cycle through" different ideas of the human mind as (to name only a few images) mechanism, spirit, chemistry, and vessel for the soul.14 These days, the cycling through intensifies. We are in much more direct contact with the machine side of mind. People are fitted with a computer chip to help with Parkinson's. They learn to see their minds as program and hardware. They take antidepressants prescribed by their psychotherapists, confident that the biochemical and oedipal self can be treated in one room. They look for signs of emotion in a brain scan. Old jokes about couples needing "chemistry" turn out not to be jokes at all. ~ Sherry Turkle

We can't run out of resources. Resources exist when the human mind sees how to use something. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

The boundary between tame and wild exists only in the imperfections of the human mind. ~ Aldo Leopold

How very important it is to bring about in the human mind the radical revolution. The crisis is a crisis in consciousness, a crisis that cannot anymore accept the old norms, the old patterns, the ancient traditions. Considering what the world is now with all the misery, conflict, destructive brutality, aggression and so on ... man is still as he was, is still brutal, violent, aggressive, acquisitive, competitive and has built a society along these lines. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Faith is a permanent and vital endowment of the human mind-a part of reason itself. The insane alone are without it. ~ Eden Phillpotts

Truth isn't pretty, I thought, and the pursuit of it doesn't make pretty people. Truth isn't elegant; that's just mathematicians' sentimentality. Truth is squalid and full of blots, and you can only find it in the accumulation of dusty and broken facts, in the cellars and sewers of the human mind ~ Hilary Mantel

This society [Jesuits] has been a greater calamity to mankind than the French Revolution, or Napoleon's despotism or ideology. It has obstructed the progress of reformation and the improvement of the human mind in society much longer and more fatally.

{Letter to Thomas Jefferson, November 4, 1816. Adams wrote an anonymous 4 volume work on the destructive history of the Jesuits} ~ John Adams

A new painting is a unique event, a birth, which enriches the universe as it is grasped by the human mind, by bringing a new form into it. ~ Henri Matisse

Education transforms and transcends the human mind toward perfection. ~ Debasish Mridha

Therefore, in reading profane authors, the admirable light of truth displayed in them should remind us, that the human mind, however much fallen and perverted from its original integrity, is still adorned and invested with admirable gifts from its Creator. If we reflect that the Spirit of God is the only fountain of truth, we will be careful, as we would avoid offering insult to him, not to reject or condemn truth wherever it appears. In
despising the gifts, we insult the Giver. ~ John Calvin

The human mind is incredible. It can do nothing without belief, yet practically anything with it. - Elana's father ~ Sylvia Engdahl

On the question of whether mathematics was discovered or invented, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans had no doubt-mathematics was real, immutable, omnipresent, and more sublime than anything that could conceivably emerge from the feeble human mind. The Pythagoreans literally embedded the universe into mathematics. In fact, to the Pythagoreans, God was not a mathematician-mathematics was God!

The importance of the Pythagorean philosophy lies not only in its actual, intrinsic value. By setting the stage, and to some extent the agenda, for the next generation of philosophers-Plato in particular-the Pythagoreans established a commanding position in Western thought. ~ Mario Livio

The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed
thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes
because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself
and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud. ~ John Fowles

The leading error of the human mind, - the bane of human happiness - the perverter of human virtue ... is Religion - that dark coinage of trembling ignorance! It is Religion - that poisoner of human felicity! It is Religion - that blind guide of human reason! It is Religion - that dethroner of human virtue! which lies at the root of all the evil and all the misery that pervade the world! ~ Frances Wright

Actually, the "leap of faith" - to give it the memorable name that Soren Kierkegaard bestowed upon it - is an imposture. As he himself pointed out, it is not a "leap" that can be made once and for all. It is a leap that has to go on and on being performed, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary. This effort is actually too much for the human mind, and leads to delusions and manias. Religion understands perfectly well that the "leap" is subject to sharply diminishing returns, which is why it often doesn't in fact rely on "faith" at all but instead corrupts faith and insults reason by offering evidence and pointing to confected "proofs." This evidence and these proofs include arguments from design, revelations, punishments, and miracles. Now that religion's monopoly has been broken, it is within the compass of any human being to see these evidences and proofs as the feeble-minded inventions that they are. ~ Christopher Hitchens

If a given idea has been held in the human mind for many generations, as almost all our common ideas have, it takes sincere and continued effort to remove it; and if it is one of the oldest we have in stock, one of the big, common, unquestioned world ideas, vast is the labor of those who seek to change it. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The need of the human mind for contrast has its roots in the mind's age-old habit of looking for differences and likenesses. When the mind can find no differences and no likenesses, as is the case when monotony is present, it restlessly, then resentfully, and at last frantically seeks for contrast that it may again busy itself with observing differences and likenesses. ~ Maren Elwood

Masonry, according to the general acceptation of the term, is an art founded on the principles of geometry, and devoted to the service and convenience of mankind. But Freemasonry, embracing a wider range and having a nobler object in view, namely, the cultivation and improvement of the human mind, may with more propriety be called a science, inasmuch as, availing itself of the terms of the former, it inculcates the principles of the purest morality, though its lessons are for the most part veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols. ~ William Howard Taft

This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts lie forever at the base; the one, and the two. - 1. Unity, or Identity; and, 2. Variety. We unite all things by perceiving the law which pervades them; by perceiving the superficial differences and the profound resemblances. But every mental act, - this very perception of identity or oneness, recognizes the difference of things. Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to speak or to think without embracing both. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Recreational development is a job not of building roads into the lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind. ~ Aldo Leopold

The obvious truth is that the moment any matter has passed through the human mind it is finally and for ever spoilt for all purposes of science. ~ G.K. Chesterton

We study humans to give them a healthier and happier life. ~ Abhijit Naskar

The human mind is so limited it can only build an arbitrary heaven - and usually the physical comforts they endow it with are naively the kind that can be perceived as we humans perceive - nothing more. No: perhaps I will awake to find myself burning in hell. I think not. I think I will be snuffed out. Black is sleep; black is a fainting spell; and black is death, with no light, no waking. ~ Sylvia Plath

Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling. ~ D.H. Lawrence

I find it very difficult to talk here now because I'm watching the sea all the time. The sea always makes me watch it all the time. I've spent hours and hours not just on the sea but just watching wave after wave come in. If it's an image of anything, I think it's an image of our own unconscious, the unconscious of our own minds ... or you can put it the other way around, and that is that we have a sea in us. After all, we are sea creatures that learnt to walk on the land, are we not? And perhaps one way or another we go back to it. Every night when we dream we go back into that kind of depths, and that kind of beauty and monstrosity and mystery. So really the sea is not a single image, it can really image almost anything that the human mind can discover. ~ William Golding

To the human mind there is something almost illogical in the assertion that God became a man. It is like speaking about a square circle. Yet this is what Christmas says - and we take refuge from our bewilderment not in explanation but in adoration. ~ Ralph P. Martin

It is a singular capriciousness of the human mind, that after all the admonitions we have had from experience on this head, there should still be found men, who object to the new constitution for deviating from a principle which has been found the bane of the old. ~ Alexander Hamilton

The human mind has a natural tendency to explore what has passed in distant ages in scenes with which it is familiar: hence the taste for National and Local Antiquities. Geology gratifies a larger taste of this kind; it inquires into what may appropriately be termed the Antiquities of the Globe itself, and collects and deciphers what may be considered as the monuments and medals of its remoter eras. ~ William Buckland

The more you learn about the human mind, the more you can use it to enhance your life. ~ Prem Jagyasi

I've been cut down, destroyed, and demolished. Someone once told me that the human mind is like a temple. A sound structure. Compiled by bricks, cement, and straw.
Built by sweating slaves after hours and hours of back-breaking labor.
But I disagree ... I disagree because even the most sound and well-built structures can crumble.
I've had days where I felt like my mind was crumbling in the palms of my hands and I was frantic, with fear and desperate with trembling fingers to put the pieces back together.
I felt like that until my husband saved me.
I want to cherish the way I feel about Elijah forever. ~ Lauren Hammond

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private. ~ Allen Ginsberg

To speak of mystery in a Christian sense means that the human mind is finite and not fully able to understand, deduce or even contain the deep structures of God's reality. ~ Tobin Wilson

That extremes beget extremes is an apothegm built on the most profound observation of the human mind. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeonholes. ~ Alfred Kinsey

There appears to be but two grand master passions or movers in the human mind, namely, love and pride. And what constitutes the beauty or deformity of a man's character is the choice he makes under which banner he determines to enlist himself. But there is a strong distinction between different degress in the same thing and a mixture of two contraries. ~ Sarah Fielding

Why do you think news of violence and aggression receive huge ratings! It's because the human mind is conditioned to pay more attention to negative events than positive ones, because even if you ignore a positive event, it's very unlikely that something bad will happen to you because of your ignorance, but if you are inattentive to a negative event, you may just lose your life. ~ Abhijit Naskar

The growth of the human mind is still high adventure, in many ways the highest adventure on earth. ~ Norman Cousins

You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Paty, which is collective and immortal. ~ George Orwell

Hence the strong attraction which magic and science alike have exercised on the human mind; hence the powerful stimulus that both have given to the pursuit of knowledge. They lure the weary enquirer, the footsore seeker, on through the wilderness of disappointment in the present by their endless promises of the future: they take him up to the top of an exceeding high mountain and show him, beyond the dark clouds and rolling mists at his feet, a vision of the celestial city, far off, it may be, but radiant with unearthly splendour, bathed in the light of dreams. ~ James G. Frazer

A time of darkness, despair, disillusion-so black only the inferno of the human mind can be-symbolic death, and numb shock-then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration ~ Sylvia Plath

Cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human mind. They realize ... that we have an infuriating inability to understand, let alone follow, even the simplest and most explicit of directions. ~ Cleveland Amory

Consumption is a universal phenomenon. All humans consume varieties of products, many of which beyond actual necessity, because it activates the brain's reward center. And the more a certain product activates the reward center with its unique characteristics or its predominant social stature, the more that product gets chiseled into the long-term memory of the consumer, making it a fundamental part of the individual's psychological well being. Thus the human mind grows a deep psychological bond with a product. And this bond can grow so strong in time that it would defend itself from all sorts of criticisms. It is the brain's way to maintain its internal purely individualistic well being. Hence, a strong psychological bond between the mind and a product slowly not only becomes invincible to criticisms, but also, develops its own cognitive immune system against such criticisms. ~ Abhijit Naskar

If you want to burrow a message into a human mind. Work it into a story ~ Jonathan Gottschall

In what way, or by what manner of working, God changes a soul from evil to good, how He impregnates the barren rock
the priceless gems and gold
is to the human mind an impenetrable mystery, in all cases alike. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All around the world, people believe that there is a great conflict between good and evil. Well, it's true that there's a conflict, but it only exists in the human mind. ~ Miguel Angel Ruiz

the human condition is just too much for an animal to take; it is overwhelming. ~ Ernest Becker

In products of the human mind, simplicity marks the end of a process of refining, while complexity marks a primitive stage. Michelangelo 's definition of art as the purgation of superfluities suggests that the creative effort consists largely in the elimination of that which complicates and confuses a pattern ~ Eric Hoffer

...free-associative sexual libel...is typical of the impulses of religious authoritarians to demonize all heretics by attributing to them every manner of outrage that a perverse human mind could imagine. ~ Jonathan Kirsch

Even though it is common knowledge in our field of Neuroscience, I take immense pleasure every time I realize that our perception of the whole universe emerges from the activity of the little specks of jelly inside our skull. ~ Abhijit Naskar

I shall tell you where we are. We're in the most extreme and utter region of the human mind. A dim, subconscious underworld. A radiant abyss where men meet themselves. Hell, Netley. We're in Hell. ~ Alan Moore

Samskrit language, as has been universally recognized by those competent to form a judgment, is one of the most magnificent, the most perfect, the most prominent and wonderfully sufficient literary instrument developed by the human mind. ~ Sri Aurobindo

A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand. ~ Geraldine Brooks

The human mind has a primitive ego defense mechanism that negates all realities that produce too much stress for the brain to handle. It's called Denial. ~ Dan Brown

When one side only of a story is heard and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it insensibly. ~ George Washington

Every human mind is a great slumbering power until awakened by a keen desire and by definite resolution to do. ~ Edgar V. Roberts

Conceive the condition of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except one, which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer's day, but in the meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of debate. Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten like bees on that one proposition which had the honey of probability in it, and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset. Our impulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea of their future nullity, than the beating of our heart, or the irritability of our muscles. ~ George Eliot

You might think that's selfish of me - and maybe it is - but I am a trained psychologist. No matter how depressed someone is, no matter how deep or unrelenting their pain may seem to be, there's always more to the picture. Situations change. Things get better. The human mind, no matter how stressed, still retains a capacity for joy. ~ D.D. Barant

The human mind is our ultimate sense organ. Mind has discovered that there are invisible infinities hidden in light. Our perception of color projects the doubly infinite-dimensional space of physical color onto the three-dimensional wall of our inner Cave. ~ Frank Wilczek

People rarely want to kill, David. It's not the basic makeup of the healthy human mind. In most situations they will go to great lengths to avoid killing. Remember that, and it will help you. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Sandra had studied psychiatry in order to understand the nature of despair, but all she had really learned was the pharmacology of it. The human mind was easier to medicate than to comprehend. ~ Robert Charles Wilson

The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception. ~ Gertrude Atherton

Of all the intellectual hurdles which the human mind has confronted and has overcome in the last fifteen hundred years the one which seems to me to have been the most amazing in character and the most stupendous in the scope of its consequences is the one relating to the problem of motion. ~ Herbert Butterfield

All space must be attached to a value, to a public dimension. There is no private space. The only private space that you can imagine is the human mind. ~ Paulo Mendes Da Rocha

The human MIND seems to work best in the presence of reality. The brain that contains the problem probably also contains the solution. IF the conditions are right, the huge intelligence of the human being surfaces. IDEAS seem to come from nowhere & sometimes STUN US. ~ Nancy Kline

What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy. ~ Terence McKenna

Unless the structure of the nucleus has a surprise in store for us, the conclusion seems plain-there is nothing in the whole system if laws of physics that cannot be deduced unambiguously from epistemological considerations. An intelligence, unacquainted with our universe, but acquainted with the system of thought by which the human mind interprets to itself the contents of its sensory experience, and should be able to attain all the knowledge of physics that we have attained by experiment. ~ Arthur Eddington

Sin, blasphemy, heresy – all these are primitive ideas created by primitive creatures, unworthy of the title "human". ~ Abhijit Naskar

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, human liberty as the source of national action, the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas ~ John F. Kennedy

There is a strange intangible place on the outside edges of the human mind. It hangs there like a constant witness. It judges a person's every move, every thought and every action. Some people think it is "big brother" or God, but it is just a critical place inside the person's own mind that judges and condemns. It is the very place where we judge ourselves when we cross Rainbow Bridge into Heaven. ~ Kate McGahan

The crown of literature is poetry. It is the end and aim. It is the sublimest activity od the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

His mind worked fast, flying in emergency supplies of common sense, as human minds do, to construct a huge anchor in sanity and prove that what happened hadn't really happened and, if it had happened, hadn't happened much. ~ Terry Pratchett

The world's greatest computer is the human mind, not the machine. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

There is something in such laws that takes the breath away. They are not discoveries or inventions of the human mind, but exist independently of us. In a moment of clarity, one can at most discover that they are there and take them into account. Long before there were people on the earth, crystals were already growing in the earth's crust. On one day or another, a human being first came across such a sparkling morsel of regularity lying on the ground or hit one with his stone tool and it broke off and fell at his feet, and he picked it up and regarded it in his open hand, and he was amazed. ~ M.C. Escher

Miguel," he said, when he felt my defenses weakening, "the conflict you speak of exists in the human mind, and it is not actually a conflict between good and evil; it is a conflict between truth and lies. When we believe in truth, we feel good and our life is good. When we believe in things that are not true, things that encourage fear and hatred in us, the result is fanaticism. The result is what people recognize as evil - evil words, evil intentions, evil actions. All the violence and suffering in the world is a direct result of the many lies we tell ourselves. ~ Miguel Ruiz

The history of literature is the history of the human mind. It is, as compared with other histories, the intellectual as distinguished from the material, the informing spirit as compared with the outward and visible. ~ William H. Prescott

The arrogance of the human mind is too fragile, as well as the patience of the human character. It is because of that, they fail to see the power of mere observation and systematic analysis. ~ Lionel Suggs

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The ability to discriminate between that which is true and that which is false is one of the last attainments of the human mind. ~ James F. Cooper

Through psychedelics we are learning that God is not an idea, God is a lost continent in the human mind. That continent has been rediscovered in a time of great peril for ourselves and our world. Is this coincidence, synchronicity, or a cruelly meaningless juxtaposition of hope and ruin? ~ Terrence McKenna

As the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner proved in the laboratory, the human mind seeks relationships between events and often finds them even when they are not present. Slot-machines are based on Skinnerian principles of intermittent reinforcement. The dumb human, like the dumb rat, only needs an occasional payoff to keep pulling the handle. The mind will do the rest. ~ Michael Shermer

A marvel," the sheikh said. "Truly, the work of the Lord of the Worlds surpasses all our puny understanding. You know, I read once that the human mind is incapable of imagining anything that does not exist somewhere, in some form. It seemed a paltry enough truth at the time-I thought, of course it must be so, since in a sense everything we will ever discover or invent has, in the eyes of God, already been discovered and invented, as God is above time. Seeing this, though, I begin to understand how much more profound that statement is. It does not simply mean that man's innovation is entirely known to God; it means there is no such thing as fiction. ~ G. Willow Wilson

We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by thinking about everything. Think. Think. Think. You can never trust the human mind anyway. It's a death trap. ~ Anthony Hopkins

A war that operates in every human mind below the subconscious level, like a computer program, constantly running in the background, guiding us to some eventuality." Kate ~ A.G. Riddle

There is no chain of philosophical reasoning or method of philosophical enquiry through which we can arrive at the truths of faith as conclusions. But once by faith we have acknowledged those truths we are able to understand why there is good reason to acknowledge them. This, as he was to argue a little later, is because of the effects of sin on the human mind. It is "because human minds are obscured by familiarity with darkness, which covers them in a night of sins and bad habits, and are unable to perceive with the clarity and purity proper to reason" that authority has been provided to bring "the faltering eye into the light of truth" (De moribus ecclesiae catholicae 31.2.31). ~ Alasdair MacIntyre

What the History is really about lies behind this: man, giant-sized, seen against the background of the entire world, universalized in his conflict with destiny, the gods, and the cosmic order. The medium that is most fertile in showing the true nature of reality is the human mind, remembering, reflective, and fertile most of all when its memory and reflection are put at the service of its dreaming and fantastic side. ~ Herodotus

The human mind is generative, creative, proactive, and reflective -- not just reactive. ~ Albert Bandura

The future is better than the past. Despite the crepe hangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands ... with tools ... with horse sense and science and engineering. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

It is perfectly possible to believe two contradictory things at one and the same time - that is one of the brilliant faculties of the human mind. ~ Simon Mawer

Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. ~ Samuel Johnson