Lucretius Quotes

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

The only thing about a man that is a man is his mind.

We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.

In all the universe there is nothing more precious than mind.

Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

But it is the knowledge of necessary and eternal truths which distinguishes us from mere animals, and gives us reason and the sciences, raising us to knowledge of ourselves and God. It is this in us which we call the rational soul or mind.

My intellect has always been more responsible than my emotions for how I respond to the world.

Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human.

We're all just bags of bones and muscle and hormones; I'll never understand what makes our minds do the things we do. It's like that statue of the monkey holding a skull. We're trying to use a thing we don't understand to understand ourselves.

I'm still a firm believer that we were definitely put here to use our minds, and that is what makes us different. And that that's the key. If there is anything that is going to stop mankind from being such a beastly, destructive creature, it is reason.

It is what makes us human, what distinguishes us from other animals. We can be aware of being aware.

To live is to think.

Without consciousness, space and time are nothing.

Our nature is the mind. And the mind is our nature.

What's more valuable - intelligence or consciousness?

Is it not the play of the mind we are after? Is it not that that shows a mind is there at all?

Then you have a big problem, because a human is a thinking animal. If you don't think, you're not really a human.

Thought is the measure of life.

As long as I am thinking, I am alive.

What do you think of the human mind? I mean, in case you think there is a human mind.

You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.

Remember, intelligence is not part of the mind. Intellect is, but intelligence is not; hence, the intellectual is full of mind but in life he behaves very unintelligently. He has a certain expertise, he is trained intellectually to, do a certain thing, his mind is functioning like a computer. But life is not one-dimensional, you cannot exhaust it in one expertise; it is multi-dimensional.

Suppose, gentleman, that man is not stupid.

Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.