Mind × Love

Mind and Love

Browse 30 quotations catalogued under mind with "love" in the text or topic label.

30 quotes

This collection contains 30 quotations filed under Mind with "love" in the quote text or topic label. These keyword matches offer a starting point for exploring Mind and Love; they do not by themselves establish a shared argument or a historical connection between the authors.

The authors represented include Ernest Hemingway, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Camus, David Hume, and others. Read each quotation in its own context rather than assuming that these authors share a position.

One matching quotation reads: "I am no romantic glorifier of the Spanish woman, nor did I ever think of a casual piece as anything much other than a casual piece in any country. But when I a…" The full quotation appears below.

Another matching quotation reads: "Slavery is wrong in its effect upon white people and free labor; it is the only thing that threatens the Union. It makes what Senator Sewar…" Compare the wording and surrounding context to decide how each passage relates to your question.

Use the quotation links to explore individual entries and the author links to visit their profiles on QuoteLineage. For broader reading beyond these keyword matches, explore all Mind quotes or the concept page for Love.

30 Quotes on Mind and Love

"I am no romantic glorifier of the Spanish woman, nor did I ever think of a casual piece as anything much other than a casual piece in any country. But when I am with Maria I love her so that I feel, literally, as though I would die and I never believed in that or thought that it could happen."

— Ernest Hemingway

"Slavery is wrong in its effect upon white people and free labor; it is the only thing that threatens the Union. It makes what Senator Seward has been much abused for calling an 'irrepressible conflict'. When they get ready to settle it, we hope they will let us know. Public opinion settles every question here, any policy to be permanent must have public opinion at the bottom, something in accordance with the philosophy of the human mind as it is. The property basis will have its weight. The love of property and a consciousness of right or wrong have conflicting places in our organization, which often make a man's course seem crooks, his conduct a riddle."

— Abraham Lincoln

"The rest of the story, to Grand's thinking, was very simple. The common lot of married couples. You get married, you go on loving a bit longer, you work. And you work so hard that it makes you forget to love."

— Albert Camus

"At that moment he knew what his mother was thinking, and that she loved him. But he knew, too, that to love someone means relatively little; or, rather, that love is never wrong enough to find the word befitting it."

— Albert Camus

"No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own. This is not only conspicuous in children, who implicitly embrace every opinion propos'd to them; but also in men of the greatest judgment and understanding, who find it very difficult to follow their own reason or inclination, in opposition to that of their friends and daily companions. To this principle we ought to ascribe the great uniformity we may observe in the humours and turn of thinking of those of the same nation; and ’tis much more probable, that this resemblance arises from sympathy, than from any influence of the soil and climate, which, tho’ they continue invariably the same, are not able to preserve the character of a nation the same for a century together. A good-natur'd man finds himself in an instant of the same humour with his company; and even the proudest and most surly take a tincture from their countrymen and acquaintance. A chearful countenance infuses a sensible complacency and serenity into my mind; as an angry or sorrowful one throws a sudden dump upon me. Hatred, resentment, esteem, love, courage, mirth and melancholy; all these passions I feel more from communication than from my own natural temper and disposition. So remarkable a phaenomenon merits our attention, and must be trac'd up to its first principles."

"Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome. Every beginning is cheerful: the threshold is the place of expectation. The boy stands astonished, his impressions guide him: he learns sportfully, seriousness comes on him by surprise. Imitation is born with us: what should be imitated is not easy to discover. The excellent is rarely found, more rarely valued. The height charms us, the steps to it do not: with the summit in our eye, we love to walk along the plain. It is but a part of art that can be taught: the artist needs it all. Who knows it half, speaks much, and is always wrong: who knows it wholly, inclines to act, and speaks seldom or late. The former have no secrets and no force : the instruction they can give is like baked bread, savory and satisfying for a single day; but flour cannot be sown, and seed-corn ought not to be ground. Words are good, but they are not the best. The best is not to be explained by words. The spirit in which we act is the highest matter. Action can be understood and again represented by the spirit alone. No one knows what he is doing while he acts aright, but of what is wrong we are always conscious. Whoever works with symbols only is a pedant, a hypocrite, or a bungler. There are many such, and they like to be together. Their babbling detains the scholar: their obstinate mediocrity vexes even the best. The instruction which the true artist gives us opens the mind; for, where words fail him, deeds speak. The true scholar learns from the known to unfold the unknown, and approaches more and more to being a master."

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Spinoza taught an intellectual love for his God, a God himself incapable of love. Though his enemies called him an "atheistic Jew," he himself emphasized his stance as a Dutch democrat, anti-monarchist and elitist, since he overtly despised the multitude of his fellow citizens. I do not think Spinoza would have wept for Amsterdam, just as Socrates would not anguish over Athens, unlike the Jesus who wept for Jerusalem. I wish I could agree with Goldstein, who finds in Spinoza's salvation-through-peace-of-mind a reaction-formation in response to Jewish martyrdom. But he was greatly cold, and coldly great; personally admirable and one of philosophy's rare saints. Read his "Ethics": it will illuminate you, but through light without heat."

— Baruch Spinoza

"He that would seriously set upon the search of truth, ought in the first place to prepare his mind with a love of it. For he that loves it not, will not take much pains to get it; nor be much concerned when he misses it. There is nobody in the commonwealth of learning who does not profess himself a lover of truth: and there is not a rational creature that would not take it amiss to be thought otherwise of. And yet, for all this, one may truly say, that there are very few lovers of truth, for truth's sake, even amongst those who persuade themselves that they are so. How a man may know whether he be so in earnest, is worth inquiry: and I think there is one unerring mark of it, viz. The not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant. Whoever goes beyond this measure of assent, it is plain receives not the truth in the love of it; loves not truth for truth's sake, but for some other bye-end."

"Observe always that everything is the result of a change, and get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and to make new ones like them."

— Marcus Aurelius

"My love, Alcibiades, which I hardly like to confess, would long ago have passed away, as I flatter myself, if I saw you loving your good things, or thinking that you ought to pass life in the enjoyment of them."

"A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. … For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."

— Viktor Frankl

"I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary world, some imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to love it and be glad to belong to it. These, Govinda, are some of the thoughts in my mind."

— Hermann Hesse

"I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time."

— Sylvia Plath

"I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being."

— Michel Foucault

"The bourgeoisie loves so-called “positive” types and novels with happy endings since they lull one into thinking that it is fine to simultaneously acquire capital and maintain one’s innocence, to be a beast and still be happy."

— Anton Chekhov

"You think of the Republican Party as a party, like the British Conservative Party - well it isn't! I don't say that the British Conservative Party is much better, I'm only saying the Republican Party is a mindset. They love war! They love money! They're out to hang on through all the connections that they have, through their various operatives."

"For a lot of people, their first love is what they'll always remember. For me it's always been the first hate, and I think that hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going. If you don't let it get out of hand, it can be canalized into writing. In this country where people love to be nonjudgmental when they can be, which translates as, on the whole, lenient, there are an awful lot of bubble reputations floating around that one wouldn't be doing one's job if one didn't itch to prick."

— Christopher Hitchens

"If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence."

— Simone Weil

"You'll always be powerless to this girl. You'll never be in charge. There's something there," George told me, "that makes you crazy and always will. If you don't cut the connection for good, in the end that something will destroy you. You're no longer merely answering natural need with her. This is the pathology in its purest form. Look," he told me, "see it as a critic, see it from a professional point of view. You violated the law of aesthetic distance. You sentimentalized the aesthetic experience with this girl — you personalized it, you sentimentalized it, and you lost the sense of separation essential to your enjoyment. Do you know when that happened? … I'm not against it because it's disgusting. I'm against it because it's falling in love. The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open."

— Philip Roth

"These people were worthy of love and admiration in their blind loyalty, in their blind strength and tenacity. With the exception of one small thing, one tiny little thing, they lacked nothing that the sage and thinker had, and that was the consciousness of the unity of all life."

— Hermann Hesse

"There is a strange duality in the human which makes for an ethical paradox. We have definitions of good qualities and of bad; not changing things, but generally considered good and bad throughout the ages and throughout the species. Of the good, we think always of wisdom, tolerance, kindliness, generosity, humility; and the qualities of cruelty, greed, self-interest, graspingness, and rapacity are universally considered undesirable. And yet in our structure of society, the so-called and considered good qualities are invariable concomitants of failure, while the bad ones are the cornerstones of success. A man — a viewing-point man — while he will love the abstract good qualities and detest the abstract bad, will nevertheless envy and admire the person who though possessing the bad qualities has succeeded economically and socially, and will hold in contempt that person whose good qualities have caused failure. When such a viewing-point man thinks of Jesus or St. Augustine or Socrates he regards them with love because they are the symbols of the good he admires, and he hates the symbols of the bad. But actually he would rather be successful than good. In an animal other than man we would replace the term “good” with “weak survival quotient” and the term “bad” with “strong survival quotient.” Thus, man in his thinking or reverie status admires the progression toward extinction, but in the unthinking stimulus which really activates him he tends toward survival. Perhaps no other animal is so torn between alternatives. Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness. Perhaps, as has been suggested, his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming, bound by his physical memories to a past of struggle and survival, limited in his futures by the uneasiness of thought and consciousness."

— John Steinbeck

"It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself, and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve. If the mind is petty, small, narrow, limited, however great and complex the problem may be, the mind approaches that problem in terms of its own pettiness. If I have a little mind and I think of God, the God of my thinking will be a little God, though I may clothe him with grandeur, beauty, wisdom, and all the rest of it. It is the same with the problem of existence, the problem of bread, the problem of love, the problem of sex, the problem of relationship, the problem of death. These are all enormous problems, and we approach them with a small mind; we try to resolve them with a mind that is very limited. Though it has extraordinary capacities and is capable of invention, of subtle, cunning thought, the mind is still petty. It may be able to quote Marx, or the Gita, or some other religious book, but it is still a small mind, and a small mind confronted with a complex problem can only translate that problem in terms of itself, and therefore the problem, the misery increases. So the question is: Can the mind that is small, petty, be transformed into something which is not bound by its own limitations?"

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Pretty woman, he thought. Pretty little black-skinned woman. Who wanted to kill for love, die for love. The pride, the conceit of these doormat women amazed him. They were always women who had been spoiled children. Whose whims had been taken seriously by adults and who grew up to be the stingiest, greediest people on earth and out of their stinginess grew their stingy little love that ate everything in sight. They could not believe or accept the fact that they were unloved; they believed that the world itself was off balance when it appeared as though they were not loved. Why did they think they were so lovable? Why did they think their brand of love was better than, or even as good as, anybody else's? But they did. And they loved their love so much they would kill anybody who got in its way."

— Toni Morrison

"Please let us be clear on this point — that you cannot by any process, through any discipline, through any form of meditation, go to truth, God, or whatever name you like to give it. It is much too vast, it cannot possibly be conceived of; no description will cover it, no book can hold it, nor any word contain it. So you cannot by any devious method, by any sacrifice, by any discipline or through any guru, go to it. You must await it, it will come to you, you cannot go to it. That is the fundamental thing one has to understand, that not through any trick of the mind, not through any control, through any virtue, any compulsion, any form of suppression, can the mind possibly go to truth. All that the mind can do is be quiet but not with the intention of receiving it. And that is one of the most difficult things of all because we think truth can be experienced right away through doing certain things. Truth is not to be bought any more than love can be bought."

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

"The whole of Asia believes in reincarnation, in being reborn in another life. When you enquire what it is that is going to be born in the next life, you come up against difficulties. What is it? Yourself? What are you? a lot of words, a lot of opinions, attachments to your possessions, to your furniture, to your conditioning. Is all that, which you call the soul, going to be reborn in the next life? Reincarnation implies that what you are today determines what you will be again in the next life. Therefore behave! — not tomorrow, but today, because what you do today you are going to pay for in the next life. People who believe in reincarnation do not bother about behavior;t all; it is just a matter of belief, which has no value. Incarnate today, afresh not in the next life! Change it now completely, change with great passion, let the mind strip itself of everything, of every conditioning, every knowledge, of everything it thinks is "right" — empty it. Then you will know what dying means; and then you will know what love is. For love is not something of the past, of thought, of culture; it is not pleasure. A mind that has understood the whole movement of thought becomes extraordinarily quiet, absolutely silent. That silence is the beginning of the new."

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

"just now has someone on his staff in the White House who basically says the Democrats are demonic. ...t's really quite shocking to see what this person who's... what I call a faux Christian. She's a "God wants me to be rich, so send me money and God will love you" sort of person. These kinds of folks, they're looking to advance their interests because they aren't thinking about the society around them. They're thinking about anything in the New Testament, about your obligation to your fellow citizen. They think "I'm in this for me and how do I get this to work for me" and that's how tyrants work."

— David Cay Johnston

"My only problem with the Grand Canyon is Americans are a little bit too proud of it for my liking. Because they're very proud of it, they are, they love it. I spent two and a half weeks in that Grand Canyon, and if one more American was to say to me " Hey! Bet you don't have anything like this in Ireland, huh?!", there was gonna be trouble! Honestly! They are so proud of that hole in the ground, you'd think they'd all got together one day with a load of shovels and dug it them-fucking-selves! And let's face it, if they were gonna do that, they would have got the Irish to do it for them, anyway. I do like Americans; they've done a lot to be proud of, to be honest with you. They invented Jack Daniel's, they invented Coca-Cola, they put the two together, hohohoho! They're a thinking people! Put a man on the moon, gave us Marlboro cigarettes, Bill Hicks, Jimi Hendrix, they've done a lot to be proud of. But the Grand Canyon was like that when they found it! And it's not like it was hard to find, the fucker's huge! " Bet you don't have anything like this in Ireland, huh?!" Yeah, if we did, we wouldn't have anywhere to put it! Stupid thing to say! Yeah, move Limerick, we have a big canyon coming in! Actually not a bad idea, really. I don't know if you've ever been to Limerick . " Limerick, you're a lady!" A big, ugly, scary lady with a knife!"

"I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart. That's how it is with us. It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever."

— Kazuo Ishiguro

"Seek, therefore, thyself! But in finding oneself, does not one find one's own nothingness? ...Carlyle answers . "The latest Gospel in the world is, Know thy work and do it. Know thyself: long enough has that poor self of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to know it, I believe! Think it thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like Hercules. That will be thine better plan." …and what is my work? — without thinking about myself, is to love God. ...And on the other hand, in loving God in myself, am I not loving myself more than God, am I not loving myself in God?"

— Miguel de Unamuno

"I would not be my natural self if I did not utter my consciousness of my limited ability to meet your full expectation or to realize the aspirations within my own breast. But I'll gladly give all that is in me, all of heart, soul, and mind and the fighting love of country, to service in our common cause. I can only pray to the omnipotent God that I may be as worthy in service as I know myself to be faithful in thought and purpose. One cannot give more."

— Warren G. Harding

Key thinkers on this theme

Ernest Hemingway· Literature Abraham Lincoln· Politics Albert Camus· Literature David Hume· Philosophy Johann Wolfgang von Goethe· Literature

Related ideas in Mind

All Mind quotes Explore the idea of Love