874 – “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.”

–John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes of Tilton

855 – Quote about your mind

“You’ve been given a mind of your own. You didn’t have to buy it. You didn’t have to earn it. The most powerful and entertaining tool a thing can possess and you were all given one for free. Don’t give it away for someone else to use. Don’t let someone else buy it from you for peanuts. It’s yours. Use it for yourself. It can literally create anything. It does not have the restrictions you have been taught it has. It can comprehend anything. So have fun, and f**k anyone that tries to take it away from you. Fill it with whatever you want to fill it with… and see what kind of magic you produce.”

–anonymous

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758 – “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

–Noam Chomsky

719 – “Life ought to be a struggle of desire towards adventures whose nobility will fertilise the soul and lead to the conception of new, glorious things.”

–Rebecca West

715 – “La grandeur des actions humaines se mesure à l’inspiration qui les fait naître. Heureux celui qui porte en soi un Dieu, un idéal de la beauté et qui lui obéit: idéal de l’art, idéal de la science, idéal de la patrie, idéal des vertus de l’Évangile! Ce sont là les sources vives des grandes pensées et des grandes actions. Toutes s’éclairent des reflets de l’infini.”

“The greatness of human actions is measured by the inspiration that it brings. Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an ideal of beauty and obeys it: an ideal of art, ideal of science, ideal of country, ideal virtues of the Gospel! These are the wellsprings of great thoughts and great actions. All reflections illuminate infinity.”

–Louis Pasteur

708 – “The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.”

–Johannes Kepler [Likely Paraphrasing, see source notes]

683 – “It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.”

–Dale Carnegie [Attributed, See Source Notes]

678 – “Men are not troubled by things themselves, but by their thoughts about them.”

–anonymous

644 – “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

–Steve Biko

631 – “It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.”

–Miles Halter in John Green’s Looking for Alaska