Top 100 Other Minds Quotes
#1. Writing fiction is a good way to inhabit other minds, if not other lives.
Sheila Heti
#2. The mind of the scholar, if you would have it large and liberal, should come in contact with other minds. It is better that his armor should be somewhat bruised by rude encounters even, than hang forever rusting on the wall.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#3. I have a low opinion of books: they are piles of stones set up to show coming travelers where other minds have been, or at best signal smokes to call attention ...
John Muir
#4. Every thought has the power to spread its effects on other minds as a wave can spread all over the ocean.
Debasish Mridha
#5. Although we human adults are really good at understanding other minds, we weren't always that way. It takes children a long time to break into the system.
Rebecca Saxe
#6. Words, I've come to learn, are pulleys through time. Portals into other minds. Without words, what remains? Indecipherable customs. Strange rites. Blighted hearts. Without words, we're history's orphans. Our lives and thoughts erased
Alena Graedon
#7. So books are real to me, too; they link me not just with other minds but with the vision of other minds, what those minds understand and see. I see their worlds as well as I see my own.
Philip K. Dick
#8. A stage play is basically a form of uber-schizophrenia. You split yourself into two minds - one being the protagonist and the other being the antagonist. The playwright also splits himself into two other minds: the mind of the writer and the mind of the audience.
David Mamet
#9. Every mind needs friendly contact with other minds, for food of expansion and growth.
Napoleon Hill
#10. Refurbished that image of herself in other minds which was her only notion of self-seeing
Edith Wharton
#11. People who have cut their teeth on philosophical problems of rationality, knowledge, perception, free will and other minds are well placed to think better about problems of evidence, decision making, responsibility and ethics that life throws up.
Simon Blackburn
#12. Genius is among other minds what the carbuncle is among gemstones; it radiates its own light while the others only reflect what they receive.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#13. The creator does not create only for the pleasure of creating but ... he also desires to subdue other minds.
Beatrice M. Hinkle
#14. In learning to know other things, and other minds, we become more intimately acquainted with ourselves, and are to ourselves better worth knowing.
Philip Gilbert Hamerton
#15. And the days darken round me, and the years, Among new men, strange faces, other minds.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#16. To think justly, we must understand what others mean. To know the value of our thoughts, we must try their effect on other minds.
William Hazlitt
#17. Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.
Neil Gaiman
#18. What I love about collaborating is that you're working with other minds that work differently to yours.
Lauren Beukes
#19. We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls. They allow us to enter other minds, not simply in the sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it.
Roger Ebert
#20. The craft of writing is the art of penetrating other minds with the figures that are in your own mind.
John Steinbeck
#21. If you have great thoughts, don't let them fly only in your mind; let them migrate to other minds as well!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#22. The purpose of the painter is simply to reproduce in other minds the impression which a scene has made upon him. A work of art does not appeal to the intellect. It does not appeal to the moral sense. Its aim is to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken an emotion.
George Inness
#23. Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.
A.A. Milne
#24. Illumination is nothing if you do not share it with anyone. Illumination is about spreading light across entire nations. It's about wearing that crown that shines like the sun on your head and getting other minds to synergize with yours.
Suzy Kassem
#25. You have always the same view from your window! For different views, visit other houses! And for different ideas, visit other minds!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#26. The mind of the scholar, if he would leave it large and liberal, should come in contact with other minds.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#27. I easily sink into mere absorption of what other minds have done, and should like a whole life for that alone.
George Eliot
#28. MINDS ARE UNIQUE. They go wrong in unique ways. My mind went wrong in a slightly different way to how other minds go wrong. Our experience overlaps with other people's, but it is never exactly the same experience.
Matt Haig
#29. It is impossible to pursue a successful literary career and follow the advice of all one's 'best friends'.I feel compelled to follow the light which my own intellect & judgement cast upon my way, rather than any one of the many conflicting rays which other minds would lend me.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
#30. An adult mind that is brimming with chunks is a powerful engine of reason, but it comes with a cost: a failure to communicate with other minds that have not mastered the same chunks.
Steven Pinker
#31. Books are but steeping stones to show you where other minds have been.
John Muir
#32. Life is a mind's attempt to win over other minds as long as it thinks the other minds are different from it.
Thiruman Archunan
#33. Nothing ought to be told, I think that does not interest or kindle one's own mind in looking back; it is the only condition on which one can hope to interest or kindle other minds.
Mary Augusta Ward
#34. He that seeks popularity in art closes the door on his own genius: as he must needs paint for other minds, and not for his own.
Anna Brownell Jameson
#35. The incorrectness and weaknesses of a theory cause other minds to formulate the problems more exactly and in this way scientific progress is made.
Robert Barany
#36. The planetary emergency unfolding around us is, first and foremost ... a crisis of thought, values, perceptions, ideas and judgments. In other words, it is a crisis of mind, which makes it a crisis of those institutions which purport to improve minds.
David W. Orr
#37. Let us say that you might have become a telepathic cancer, a malignant mentality which in its inevitable dissolution would have poisoned other and greater minds.
Arthur C. Clarke
#38. We can speak our honest minds without compromise and without censorship and to each other and to our people. We can take our message directly to our people.
Glenn Miller
#39. Step into the mystery of the mind. There are billions of minds, there are billions of selves. There are billions of worlds and dimensions.
Frederick Lenz
#40. What appears to be lacking, even in great apes, is a motivation to find means to exchange what is on each other's minds.
Thomas Suddendorf
#41. Fiction gives us empathy: It puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.
Ray Bradbury
#42. We should not only refrain from thinking about gratifying our desires but also avoid focusing on not gratifying our desires. The way to deal with temptation is not to grit our teeth and make up our minds that we will not do a certain thing. The key is to fill our minds with other things.
David Jeremiah
#43. Music seems to stimulate more parts of our mind than almost every other activity. It combines more parts of our minds. It synchronizes our minds. It allows people in groups to do a non-verbal immediate activity together.
Tod Machover
#44. Forgetting the things that lie behind, I will strive towards my higher spiritual possibilities. I dedicate myself anew to the service of the Coming One and will do all I can to prepare men's minds and hearts for that event. I have no other life intention.
Alice Bailey
#45. Now, having had this experience, I can't say really what they were looking for. I don't know their minds. But every time I see a reality show, it seems that the most entertaining parts on other reality shows are when they make their guests look foolish.
Liza Minnelli
#46. Software is a reflection of our own mind. And as our software improves it will not only take on the patterns of our minds more closely, but it will also pick up the energy of our minds; in other words, I think that software is alive.
Frederick Lenz
#47. People should make up their minds whether to live or to die and do one or the other with the least inconvenience to others.
P.D. James
#48. I never think of myself as an icon. What is in other people's minds is not in my mind. I just do my thing.
Audrey Hepburn
#49. We live what we know. If we believe the universe and ourselves to be mechanical, we will live mechanically. On the other hand, if we know that we are part of an open universe, and that our minds are a matrix of reality, we will live more creatively and powerfully.
Marilyn Ferguson
#50. If there's anything I'd like to preach about, the loudest, other than the Gospel, it's selfishness. If there's anything I'd like to impress upon the hearts and minds of my people, it's to get out of the self life.
Jack Hyles
#51. Only fiction has the power to cross the mental barricades, to make strangers intelligible to each other, because it moves people's hearts as well as engaging their minds.
Ian Leslie
#52. Knowledge dwells in heads replete with thoughts of other men; wisdom in minds attentive to their own.
William Cowper
#53. We can't ever go back to old things or try and get the "old kick" out of something or find things the way we remembered them. We have them as we remember them and they are fine and wonderful and we have to go on and have other things because the old things are nowhere except in our minds now.
Ernest Hemingway,
#54. We'd all be scared if we knew what was swept under the carpet of each other's minds
Stephen King
#55. When we speak of power, we mean man's control over the minds and actions of other men. By political power we refer to the mutual relations of control among the holders of public authority and between the latter and the people at large.
Hans J. Morgenthau
#56. Our soul's problem, however, is not its neediness; it's our fallenness. Our need was meant to point us to God. Instead, we fasten our minds and bodies and wills on other sources of ultimate devotion, which the Bible calls idolatry.
John Ortberg
#57. Without lesions making everyone agreeable, society was left roiling in a constant battle of words, images, and ideas. All around her Tally felt the city seething, all those unfettered minds bouncing their opinions off each other, like something ready to explode.
Scott Westerfeld
#58. The minds of different generations are as impenetrable one by the other as are the monads of Leibniz.
Andre Maurois
#59. It is fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead.What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented all these new minds, new sciences,new talks, therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks.
U.G. Krishnamurti
#60. It was as if they could read each other's minds. No, not minds: each other's mindlessness.
Margaret Atwood
#61. O I never thought that joys would run away from boys,
Or that boys would change their minds and forsake such summer joys;
But alack I never dreamed that the world had other toys
John Clare
#62. We spend our lives getting caught up in all the wrong things
led astray by our minds, our egos, seeing ourselves as separate from each other, rather than listening to the truth that lies within our own hearts, the truth that we are all connected, we are all in it together.
Alyson Noel
#63. Everybody is bound by some social rules. But I think that artists need some kind of freedom to explore their minds and that some of them tend to take that freedom to live a little more openly or a little more dangerously, sometimes a lot more self-destructively, than other people.
Anne Roiphe
#64. We as a people, as a state, and as a community, have too much promise, too much potential, and too much at stake to go any other way than forward. We are too strong in our hearts, too innovative in our minds, and too firm in our beliefs to retreat from our goals.
Bill Richardson
#65. The fact is, with the exception of our own minds, no power on earth has the consistent and absolute ability to convince us that we are wrong. However much we might be prompted by cues from other people or our environment, the choice to face up to error is ultimately ours alone.
Kathryn Schulz
#66. So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.
Kurt Vonnegut
#67. Change begins with understanding and understanding begins by identifying oneself with another person: in a word, empathy. The arts enable us to put ourselves in the minds, eyes, ears and hearts of other human beings.
Richard Eyre
#68. We are not given any promises that, because of our noble intentions, everything will be okay. We learn that what truly heals is gratitude and tenderness. We [need] to transform our minds and actions for the sake of other people and for the future of the world.
Pema Chodron
#69. They are a brilliant device for shape-shifting as we can slip into the skin of authors from other times, other cultural backgrounds, brilliant minds who give us a new perspective on life and the world - something we all need from time to time. - Cornelia Funke
Jen Campbell
#70. Because the brain models our sense of self as just another instance of a thing, it is easy for us to project qualities that we only know of from our own minds into other objects. This allows us to imagine intelligence in a rock, a tree, an animal or even a politician.
Sean Hastings
#71. In activities other than purely logical thought, our minds function much faster than any computer yet devised.
Daniel Crevier
#72. but that it is only the writings and precepts of the philosophers and other fine writers that are the true riches, because they enrich with virtue the minds of those that possess them." Euthydemus
Xenophon
#73. Without doubt, the most common weakness of all human beings is the habit of leaving their minds open to the negative influence of other people.
Napoleon Hill
#74. The way our minds work is that one positive thing and one negative thing does not equal each other.
Instead, one negative thing can drastically bring down 2 or 3 positive things.
Osayi Emokpae Lasisi
#75. That is why all romantics are anti-Voltairean, even Michelet, whose political fervor ought to have made him stand aligned with Voltaire; and that is why, on the other hand, all the minds which accept the world and recognize its irony and indifference are Voltairean.
Voltaire
#76. The finest minds seem to be formed rather by efforts at original thinking, by endeavours to form new combinations, and to discover new truths, than by passively receiving the impressions of other men's ideas.
Thomas Malthus
#77. I think it's too fast to say that all sci-fi ultimately winds up having some place in science. On the other hand, imaginative minds working outside of science as storytellers certainly have come upon ideas that, with the passing decades, have either materialized of come close to materializing.
Brian Greene
#78. 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
#79. There are three kinds of minds: first those that attain insight and understanding of things by their own means, then those that recognize what is right when others explain it to them, and finally those that are capable of neither one nor the other.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#80. I think that all of them must have lost their minds and have forgotten everything we were to each other. I said that they were no sisters to me, that I would forget them. But they have gone further than this: they have become my enemies.
Philippa Gregory
#81. The written word held a power she almost revered: to be able to write so as to influence the hearts and minds of other readers seemed nothing short of a miracle.
Patti Callahan Henry
#82. Have seen no other effects in rods but to make children's minds more remiss or more maliciously headstrong.
Michel De Montaigne
#83. Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in people's minds with emotion.
Rachel Cusk
#84. People sometimes forget how to be happy due to a failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal footing. That was the only moral a story must have.
Ian McEwan
#85. It is not your duty or responsibility to change the minds of other people. The nature of their thinking is advanced or limited by their experience. In your presence, they have an opportunity to learn about you and, perhaps, to grow.
Iyanla Vanzant
#86. I know men; and I tell you that Jesus Christ is not a man. Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires, and the gods of other religions. That resemblance does not exist. There is between Christianity and whatever other religions the distance of infinity ...
Napoleon Bonaparte
#87. The solitude of women's minds is regrettable, I said to myself, it's a waste to be separated from each other without procedures, without tradition.
Elena Ferrante
#88. Mathematics, as much as music or any other art, is one of the means by which we rise to a complete self-consciousness. The significance of mathematics resides precisely in the fact that it is an art; by informing us of the nature of our own minds it informs us of much that depends on our minds.
Antoine Thomson D'Abbadie
#89. I love to lose myself in other men's minds ... Books think for me.
Charles Lamb
#90. Maybe we slip in and out of alternate worlds through our minds and our imaginations, picking up scar tissue from other dimensions.
Lang Leav
#91. Minds me of a married woman who was very proud of her virtue. She slept with other men only when her husband was away.
Robert A. Heinlein
#92. The minds of men are mirrors to one another, not only because they reflect each other's emotions, but also because those rays of passions, sentiments and opinions may be often reverberated, and may decay away by insensible degrees.
David Hume
#93. There are so many ways to tell time-one way with clocks and watches and sunsets, or other ways with how many times a person laughs, or what they forget, or how they change their minds about what they care about, or why, or whom.
Gordon Dahlquist
#94. They looked at one another in incomprehension, two minds driving opposite ways up a narrow street and waiting for the other man to reverse first.
Terry Pratchett
#95. Never let up. The more you can win by, the more doubts you put in the other players' minds the next time out.
Sam Snead
#96. Psychology assumes that "things" are and "minds" are; and that, within certain limits determined by the so-called "nature" of both, they act causally upon each other.
George Trumbull Ladd
#98. For the writer, the risks are quite palpable and enduring. With each new character, each new setting, and each new plotline, something dark from deep inside the recesses of our minds makes its way to the surface where it will take hold and remain. I wouldn't have it any other way.
J.F. Juzwik
#99. If you worry less about what people think of you, you can pick up an astonishing amount of information about them. You no longer leave conversations wondering what just happened. Other people's minds and motives are finally revealed.
Pamela Druckerman
#100. Fear is but another name for lack of power to control our minds, or, in other words, to control the kind of thought we think or put out.
Prentice Mulford
