H. L. Mencken Quotes

Sometimes I have these abstract ideas and then lose track of myself.

The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.

We are asleep with compasses in our hands.

The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.

Wolves never look more funny than when they have lost the scent and scrabble to find it again: they hop in the air; they run in circles, they plow up the ground with their noses . . . .

They had their faces twisted toward their haunches and found it necessary to walk backward, because they could not see ahead of them. ...And since he wanted so to see ahead, he looks behind and walks a backward path.

The mind revels in conjecture. Where information is lacking, it will gladly fill in the gaps.

Most people ended up, after only a couple of months, so far away from where they'd intended to go, stuck in some barbed underbrush of a quagmire when they'd meant to head straight to the ocean.

It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.

When you can not find someone, it is because you've been misdirected to look elsewhere

A good painter is to paint two main things, men and the working of man's mind.

His suspicion that he was not going in the right direction tortmented him more and more. At last he had the conviction that he would never go anywhere but in the wrong direction, to the very end of the handful of days that was left to him, unhappy moonstruck pilgrim, whose April was to be cut off short.

There are patterns because we try to find them. A desperate attempt at order because we can't face the terror that it might all be random.

Life is funny isn’t it? Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, just when you finally begin to plan something, get excited about something, and feel like you know what direction you’re heading in, the paths change, the signs change, the wind blows the other way, north is suddenly south, and east is west, and you’re lost. It is so easy to lose your way, to lose direction. And that’s with following all the signposts

Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings.

Even intellectuals should have learned by now that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs.

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

I was like a cat always climbing the wrong tree.

The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to trurh.

What is intelligence, anyway It is only a word that people use to name those unknown processes with which our brains solve problems we call hard. But whenever you learn a skill yourself, you're less impressed or mystified when other people do the same. This is why the meaning of 'intelligence' seems so elusive: It describes not some definite thing but only the momentary horizon of our ignorance about how minds might work.

We always have a tendency to see those things that do not exist and to be blind to the great lessons that are right there before our eyes.

There is no order of things except in the human mind.

But believe me, just because the human mind can't imagine something happening...doesn't mean it won't.

The human mind shows an urge to capture into fixed forms through unreal assumptions, that is, fictions, that which is chaotic, always in flux, and incomprehensible. Serving this urge, the child quite generally uses a scheme in order to act and to find his way. We proceed much the same when we divide the earth by meridians and parallels, for only thus do we obtain fixed points which we can bring into a relationship with one another.

Human intellect is incurably abstract.