67 Mind-Expanding Quotes

In a world filled with constant noise and distractions, sometimes all it takes is a single quote to shift our perspective, ignite our imagination, and expand our understanding of what’s possible. Whether you're seeking a spark of inspiration, a moment of introspection, or a fresh viewpoint on life's many complexities, powerful words have the ability to profoundly impact our minds and hearts. Join us as we delve into a carefully selected array of 67 mind-expanding quotes that will challenge your thinking, enrich your soul, and perhaps even transform your worldview.

1. “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” - Joseph Addison

2. “Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.[Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Nov. 1980), pp. 16-32]” - Barbara Tuchman

3. “...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.” - Antonio Damasio

4. “There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.” - Charles Dickens

5. “As Lucretius says: 'Thus ever from himself doth each man flee.' But what does he gain if he does not escape from himself? He ever follows himself and weighs upon himself as his own most burdensome companion. And so we ought to understand that what we struggle with is the fault, not of the places, but of ourselves” - seneca

6. “At that moment I had no mind to change, or not change, or throw against the nearest wall.” - James Patterson

7. “The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows” - Stephen King

8. “A heart has problems which mind cannot understand.” - Santosh Kalwar

9. “Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation.” - Rabindranath Tagore

10. “Always, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much that lies before us. We want a simple world, but we live in a magnificently complex one, and rather than open ourselves to it, we perceive the world through filters that make it less daunting.” - Dean Koontz

11. “The mind's first step to self-awareness must be through the body.” - George Sheehan

12. “the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger.” - Erica Jong

13. “Rise above the deceptions and temptations of the mind. This is your duty. You are born for this only; all other duties are self-created and self-imposed owing to ignorance.” - Sivananda

14. “Because fear kills everything," Mo had once told her. "Your mind, your heart, your imagination.” - Cornelia Funke

15. “Your mind is your kingdom, and there you are ruler” - Jack Addington

16. “Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer.” - Humphry Davy

17. “There is no UFO and also there is no alien, at least not in common mind nor reference.” - Toba Beta

18. “If you want to be sure of unusual thing such as aliens or UFOs, then you have to think about it from an unusual way of thinking.” - Toba Beta

19. “When we feel, a kind of lyric is sung in our heart. When we think, a kind of music is played in our mind. In harmony, both create a beautiful symphony of life.” - Toba Beta

20. “A veiled Mind is more enticing than all the nude men lining up the Seine, during Summer.” - AainaA-Ridtz A R

21. “Not till your thoughts cease all their branching here and there, not till you abandon all thoughts of seeking for something, not till your mind is motionless as wood or stone, will you be on the right road to the Gate.” - Huang Po

22. “But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?” - Charles Darwin

23. “The mind knows only what lies near the heart.” - Edith Hamilton

24. “Somos o que pensamos, e dizemos aquilo que pensamos com palavras. Se as palavras são tão mal usadas, deturpadas, mal pronunciadas muitas vezes, que pensamento podem expressar? Isso é frustrante.” - José Saramago

25. “Smartass Disciple: Master, you should teach people not to do war to each other.Master of Stupidity: I should teach people how to win their minds of their wars.” - Toba Beta

26. “You know, it's pretty easy reading this book to see why I was angry and confused for all those years. I lived my life being told different stories: some true, some lies and I still don't know which is which. Children are born innocent. At birth we are very much like a new hard drive - no viruses, no bad information, no crap that's been downloaded into it yet. It's what we feed into that hard drive, or in my case "head drive" that starts the corruption of the files.” - Nikki Sixx

27. “Ամբողջ մարմնի կենդանութիւնը հոգին է, իսկ մարմինն ու հոգին կառավարողը՝ միտքն է:The whole essence of the body is the spirit, while the governor of both spirit and body is the mind.” - Saint Vardapet Eghishē

28. “We humans seem to be extremely good at generating ideas, theories, and explanations that have the ring of plausibility. We may be relatively deficient, however, in evaluating and testing our ideas once they are formed” - Thomas Gilovich

29. “Looking at beauty in the world, is the first step of purifying the mind.” - Amit Ray

30. “A solid idea is a firm foundation of a universe construction.” - Toba Beta

31. “It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.” - Marcel Proust

32. “So that it must be only by the imagination that Satan has access to the soul, to tempt and delude it, or suggest anything to it. And this seems to be the reason why persons that are under the disease of melancholy are commonly so visibly and remarkably subject to the suggestions and temptations of Satan... Innumerable are the ways by which the mind may be led on to all kind of evil thoughts, by the exciting of external ideas in the imagination.” - Jonathan Edwards

33. “But there are weak men who can lift cars if their wives are pinned underneath. The brain, Garraty." McVries's voice had dropped to a hoarse whisper. "It isn’t man or God. It’s something...in the brain.” - Stephen King

34. “Ignorance is hardly unusual, Miss Davar. The longer I live, the more I come to realize that it is the natural state of the human mind. There are many who will strive to defend its sanctity and then expect you to be impressed with their efforts.” - Brandon Sanderson

35. “A fully belly is little worth where the mind is starved.” - Mark Twain

36. “The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one.” - Nathaniel Hawthorne

37. “It's a thought," I said with a grin."That's exactly what it is, Dan - a thought - no more real than the shadow of a shadow. Consciousness is not In the body; the body is In Consciousness. And you Are that Consciousness - no the phantom mind that troubles you so. You are the body, but you are everything else, too. That is what your visions revealed to you. Only the mind resists change. When you relax mindless into the body, you are happy and content and free, sensing no separation. Immortality is Already yours, but not in the same way you imagined or hope for. You have been immortal since before you were born and will be long after the body dissolves. The body is in Consciousness; never born; never dies; only changes. The mind - your ego, personal beliefs, history, and identity - is all that ends at death. And who needs it?" Socrates leaned back into his chair."I'm not sure all of that sank in.""Of course not." He laughed. "Words mean little unless you realize the truth of it yourself. And when you do, you'll be free at last.” - Dan Millman

38. “The fear is not real, Dil Bahadur; it is only in your mind, like all other things. Our thoughts form what we believe to be reality.” - Isabel Allende

39. “Because you don't learn anything unless you can find the patience to read. TV takes that away from you. It robs you from your mind.” - Markus Zusak

40. “Invariably, we all are 'MIND LORDS'.” - Ogwo David Emenike

41. “Enclosed within the tyranny of our minds and there is where we are lost.” - Robert Dodson

42. “A timid mind is apt to mistake every scratch for a mortal wound.” - George Gordon Byron

43. “Juilin," she asked hesitantly, "what were you going to do with the salt and cooking oil? Not exactly," she added more quickly. "Just a general idea." He looked at her for a moment. "I do not know. But they did not, either. That is the trick of it; their minds made up worse then I ever could. I have seen a tough man break when I sent for a basket of figs and some mice.” - Robert Jordan

44. “And it's a disquieting thought that not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven. One single second, one single landscape, in which what happens activates and deactivates what has already happened in endless chain reactions, like the processes that take place in the brain, perhaps, where cells suddenly bloom and die away, all according to the way the winds of consciousness are blowing.” - Karl Ove Knausgård

45. “Machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate: only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers, don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty! You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure! Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world . . .” - Charles Chaplin

46. “Let us at least say of religion that it means that every part of the body is infused with mind, not that the mind is overwhelmed and drowned in body. For the principal attribute of the Gods, without or within us, is mind.” - Thornton Wilder

47. “As with stomachs, we should pity minds that do not eat.” - Victor Hugo

48. “I've always liked the minds of criminals, they seem similar to artists.” - Richard Linklater

49. “As you reinvent your life endlessly you should open your minds to the infinite possibilities that do exist.” - Steven Redhead

50. “The mind is the mine of man, wherein he digs out good or evil.” - Ogwo David Emenike

51. “I begin to realize that my memory is a great catacomb, and that below my actual standing-ground there is layer after layer of historical ashes. Is the life of mind something like that of great trees of immemorial growth? Is the living layer of consciousness super-imposed upon hundreds of dead layers? Dead? No doubt this is too much to say, but still, when memory is slack the past becomes almost as though it had never been. To remember that we did know once is not a sign of possession but a sign of loss; it is like the number of an engraving which is no longer on its nail, the title of a volume no longer to be found on its shelf. My mind is the empty frame of a thousand vanished images.” - Henri Frédéric Amiel

52. “In the end, it mattered not that you could not close your mind. It was your heart that saved you.” - J.K. Rowling

53. “Ambition: it is the last infirmity of noble minds.” - J. M. Barrie

54. “My eyes in tearsHeart never sighsMy mind never fearsI conquer the lies” - Munia Khan

55. “Suffering builds character and impels you to penetrate life’s secrets. It’s the path of great artists, great religious leaders, great social reformers. The problem is not suffering per se, but rather our identification with our own ego: our divided, dualistic, cramped view of things. ‘We are too ego-centered,’ Suzuki tells Cage.’ The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow. We seem to carry it all the time from childhood up to the time we finally pass away.” - Kay Larson

56. “Life is like a game of chess.To win you have to make a move.Knowing which move to make comes with IN-SIGHTand knowledge, and by learning the lessons that areacculated along the way.We become each and every piece within the game called life!” - Allan Rufus

57. “The difference between a trained mind and a free mind is that a trained mind will fail to see just how trained their mind is by tradition, while a free mind has discarded such limitations...” - Lionel Suggs

58. “To Mr. Jones, she said, imagine you're looking up at a blue sky, and imagine a tiny airplane skywriting the letter Z. Then let the wind erase the letter. Then imagine the plane writing the letter Y. Let the wind erase it. Then the letter X. Erase it. Then the letter W. Let the wind erase it.” - Chuck Palahniuk

59. “Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize 'The stars are words' and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind.” - Jack Kerouac

60. “But there is saying, and there is doing, and almost always people do something better than they can talk about it, as though the minded body defeats every attempt to select out only the mind part as deserving sole responsibility for the success.” - Alice Koller

61. “He shrugs. "Doesn't help to waste my time thinking about would've-beens."Laila whispers, "He says to the girl with a mind full of them.” - Kasie West

62. “If you are ready for the secret, you already possess one half of it,therefore, you will readily recognize the other half the moment it reaches your mind.” - Napoleon Hill

63. “Tis the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” - Aristotle

64. “I do not think either virginity or old age contemptible, and some of the shrewdest minds I have met inhabited the bodies of old maids.” - C.S. Lewis

65. “It taught that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes.” - Lauren DeStefano

66. “Normally we divide the external world into that which we consider to be good or valuable, bad or worthless, or neither. Most of the time these discriminations are incorrect or have little meaning. For example, our habitual way of categorizing people as friends, enemies, and strangers depending on how they make us feel is both incorrect and a great obstacle to developing impartial love for all living beings. Rather than holding so tightly to our discriminations of the external world, it would be much more beneficial if we learned to discriminate between valuable and worthless states of mind.” - Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

67. “[...] passion is by no means the fuller life which it seems to be in the dreams of adolescence, but is on the contrary a kind of naked and denuding intensity, verily, a bitter destitution, the impoverishment of a mind being emptied of all diversity, an obsession of the imagination by a single image.” - Denis de Rougemont