Quotes About Mind

The test and use of a man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.

The mind is not some organ that does the sense-making. That role belongs to the brain. The mind is a product of our sense-making activity. It is what our sense-making postulates when it tries to make sense of itself.

The human mind, just because man is by nature a spiritual-rational-moral agent, will not and cannot forever shun the larger issues of truth and reality; the nonmeta-physical and antimetaphysical eras always turn out to be transition interludes.

There are cases where psychoanalysis works worse than anything else. But who said that psychoanalysis was to be applied always and everywhere.

The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not—which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams.

It seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence.

Finché non prenderai coscienza l'inconscio governerà la tua vita. E tu lo chiamerai destino.

Our psyche is part of nature, and its enigma is as limitless

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

In his own mind, it was never a matter of courage. But courage it was.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

Intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside of the province of reason.

I have always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way.

the really complex and unfamiliar part of the human mind, from which symbols are produced, is still virtually unexplored. It seems almost incredible that though we receive signals from it every night, deciphering these communications seems too tedious for any but a very few people to be bothered with. Man's greatest instrument, his psyche, is little thought of, and it is often directly mistrusted and despised. "It's only psychological" too often means: It is nothing.

But anyone who really knows the human psyche will agree with me when I say that it is one of the darkest and most mysterious regions of our experience. There is no end to what can be learned in this field.

In this way he slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual world where the products of his conscious activity progressively take the place of reality.

The forlorn state of consciousness in our world is due primarily to loss of instinct, and the reason for this lies in the development of the human mind over the past aeon. The more power man had over nature, the more his knowledge and skill went to his head, and the deeper became his contempt for the merely natural and accidental, for all irrational data—including the objective psyche, which is everything that consciousness is not.

I am not altogether pessimistic about neurosis. In many cases we have to say, "Thank heaven he could make up his mind to be neurotic." Neurosis is really an attempt at self-cure…It is an attempt of the self-regulating psychic system to restore the balance, in no way different from the function of dreams – only rather more forceful and drastic.

like a dream which seems a reality as long as we are in it.

No culture of the mind is enough to make a garden out of your soul.

so intimate is the intermingling of bodily and psychic traits" wrote Carl Jung "that not only can we draw far-reaching inferences as to the constitution of the psyche from the constitution of the body, but we can also infer from psychic peculiarities the corresponding bodily characteristics.

I don't believe in such a thing as the criminal mind. Everyone's mind is criminal, we're all capable of criminal fantasies and thoughts." - Karl Menninger