Michel de Montaigne Quotes

The mind is a strange and wonderful thing. I'm not sure it'll ever be able to figure itself out. Everything else maybe, from the atom to the universe, everything except itself.

I have no inner monologue.

The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure. Thoughts are not etched on the inside of skulls, to be perused by an invader. The mind is a complex and many-layered thing.

The mind is an enchanting thing.

I like the human mind and how messed up it is.

There are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal.

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

Consciousness is the perception of what passes in man's own mind.

The mind is a complex and many-layered thing, Potter... or at least, most minds are.

Someday, Dante, I will discover how your mind works

The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness.

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

Keep thinking. You can hear our brains rattling around inside us, like the littler Russian dolls.

The mind is constantly involved in thinking, in judging, in evaluating. Its whole function seems to be to keep you involved in thoughts, which are nothing but soap bubbles - or perhaps soap bubbles have more substance to them than your thoughts.

At every moment where language can't go, that's your mind.

We're inquiring into the deepest nature of our constitutions: How we inherit from each other. How we can change. How our minds think. How our will is related to our thoughts. How our thoughts are related to our molecules.

I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the 'monkey mind' -- the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl.

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

I'm not sure if I could tell the difference—between just staring into space and thinking. We're usually thinking all the time, aren't we? Not that we live in order to think, but the opposite isn't true either—that we think in order to live. I believe, contrary to Descartes, that we sometimes think in order not to be. Staring into space might unintentionally have the opposite effect.

If he had a mind, there was something on it.

It's just a constant thing when the mind starts to wake up to itself.

The more accurately we search into the human mind, the stronger traces we everywhere find of his wisdom who made it.

They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.

Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.

The mind has no existence by itself; it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.