Swami Vivekananda Quotes

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, whereas consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love, and anger. Throughout history, intelligence always went hand in hand with consciousness.

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

The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.

Along with our many human propensities, we evolved a huge cerebral cortex with which we make decisions.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

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

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

[Warren] Harding is incapable of thought, because he has nothing to think with.

Guess what? Human beings are complex.

The individual is the brain, not the heart.

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.

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

I can readily conceive of a man without hands or feet; and I could conceive of him without a head, if experience had not taught me that by this he thinks, Thought then, is the essence of man, and without this we cannot conceive of him.

I love the human mind.

First, then, I say, that the mind, which we often call the intellect, in which is placed the conduct and government of life, is not less an integral part of man himself, than the hand, and foot, and eyes, are portions of the whole animal.

Thought makes the whole dignity of man; therefore endeavor to think well, that is the only morality.

Defects and weakness in men's understandings, as well as other faculties, come from want of a right use of their own minds; I am apt to think, the fault is generally mislaid upon nature, and there is often a complaint of want of parts, when the fault lies in want of a due improvement of them.

People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness. They always have the power to think, and to think about their thinking, and to think about thinking about their thinking, which the goddamn dolphin, as far as we know, can't do. Therefore they have much greater ability to change themselves than any other animal has, and I hope that REBT teaches them how to do it.

Man is, and was always, a block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider.

For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity.

I thought about how odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people. The only activities I could think of that humans do that have no animal equivalent were smoking, body-building and writing. That's not much, considering how special we seem to think we are.

Thinking clearly and effectively is the greatest asset of any human being. We are constantly reminded that the one superiority that man has over other animals is the ability to think. It is primarily our ability to think that sets us apart from other animals.

Unlike the animal, God has given man the faculty of reason.

The soul is characterized by these capacities; self-nutrition, sensation, thinking, and movement.

That in the soul which is called mind (by mind I mean that whereby the soul thinks and judges) is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing. For this reason it cannot reasonably be regarded as blended with the body