Quotes about Mind

One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.

We sometimes forget even what we have done, so how much more what we have thought.

Hence much reading deprives the mind of all elasticity, as a weight continually pressing upon it does a spring, and the most certain means of never having any original thoughts is to take a book in hand at once, at every spare moment. This practice is the reason why scholarship makes most men more unintelligent and stupid than they are by nature, and deprives their writings of all success; they are, as Pope says— 'For ever reading, never to be read'.

Bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind. In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.

Simplicity has always been looked upon as a token, not only of truth, but also of genius. Style receives its beauty from the thought expressed, while with those writers who only pretend to think it is their thoughts that are said to be fine because of their style. Style is merely the silhouette of thought; and to write in a vague or bad style means a stupid or confused mind.

Deny that the Bible is, without any qualifications, the very Word of God, and you are left without any ultimate standard of measurement and without any supreme authority. Grant that the Bible is a Divine revelation and communication of God's own mind and will to men, and you have a fixed starting point from which an advance can be made into the domain of truth.

We are on strike, we, the men of the mind. We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one's happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.

A "collective" mind does not exist. It is merely the sum of endless numbers of individual minds. If we have an endless number of individual minds who are weak, meek, submissive and impotent — who renounce their creative supremacy for the sake of the "whole" and accept humbly that the "whole's" verdict — we don't get a collective super-brain. We get only the weak, meek, submissive and impotent collective mind.

I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke a cigarette thinking. I wonder what great things have come from those hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind - and it is only proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.

She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.

Man's basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know.

For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind.