#Human Mind Quotes

“I suppose an entire cabinet of shells would be an expression of the whole human mind; a Flora of the whole globe would be so likewise, or a history of beasts; or a painting of all the aspects of the clouds. Everything is significant.”

“We admit, in geometry, not only infinite magnitudes, that is to say, magnitudes greater than any assignable magnitude, but infinite magnitudes infinitely greater, the one than the other. This astonishes our dimension of brains, which is only about six inches long, five broad, and six in depth, in the largest heads.”

“Old heads as well as young may sometimes be charged with ignorance and presumption. The natural course of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.”

“All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly.”

“I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. All act and react upon one another.”

“Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.”

“The errors of the observer come from the qualities of the human mind.”

“Imagination is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.”

“Reason in a creature is a faculty of widening the rules and purposes of the use of all its powers far beyond natural instinct; it acknowledges no limits to its projects. Reason itself does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress from one level of insight to another.”

“Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.”

“Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.”

“All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.”

“The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.”

“In a way there's only a fine shade of difference between the healthy and the deranged.”

“The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value; hence those fatal critics who can never point out the differing quality of two poets without putting them in an order of preference as if they were candidates for a prize.”

“Human intellect is incurably abstract.”

“The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary color in the spectrum.”

“If it's hard to remember, it'll be difficult to forget.”