607 Mind Quotes

A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things but cannot receive great ones.

It's in the private places of the heart that freedom is made or unmade by the discipline we create there.

The Here-and-Now demands attention, is more present to us. We dismiss the inner world of our ideas as less important, although most of our immediate physical reality originated only in the mind. The TV, sofa, clock and room, the whole civilisation that contains them once were nothing save ideas.

Material existence is entirely founded on a phantom realm of mind, whose nature and geography are unexplored.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.

The entire universe - for one thing - only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

Only when an ideal of peace is born in the minds of the peoples will the institutions set up to maintain this peace effectively fulfill the function expected of them.

A thought is a screen, not a mirror; that is why you live in a thought envelope, untouched by Reality.

That in the soul which is called the mind is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

It can take a surprisingly long time to get from one part of my mind to another.

There's no harm in talking to yourself, but try to avoid telling yourself jokes you've heard before.

I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not. I am, however, quite certain that I am having certain experiences, whether they be those of a dream or those of waking life.

What part of us feels pleasure? Is it our hand, our arm, our flesh, or our blood? It must obviously be something immaterial.

Our mind is all we've got. Not that it won't lead us astray sometimes, but we still have to analyze things out within ourselves.

Keep violence in the mind where it belongs.

Most SF is about madness, or what is currently ruled to be madness; this is part of its attraction - it's always playing with how much the human mind can encompass.

I can't help believing that these things that come from the subconscious mind have a sort of truth to them. It may not be a scientific truth, but it's psychological truth.

Faith makes it possible to achieve that which man's mind can conceive and believe.

True thusness is the substance of thought, and thought is the function of true thusness. There is no thought except that of true thusness. Thusness does not move, but its motion and function are inexhaustible.

The mind is like a fertile garden in which anything that is planted, flowers or weeds, will grow.

Genius is one of the many forms of insanity.

In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.

What use is my mind? Granted that it enables me to hail a bus and to pay my fare. But once I am inside my studio, what use is my mind? I have my model, my pencil, my paints. My mind doesn't interest me.

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.

Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.

Freedom begins between the ears.

A soul without reflection, like a pile Without inhabitant, to ruin runs.

What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds.

I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind.

The power of changing oneself lies not in the mind, but in the body and the feelings. Unfortunately, however, our body and our feelings are so constituted that they don't care a jot about anything so long as they are happy. They live for the moment and their memory is short. The mind alone lives for tomorrow. Each has its own merits. The merit of the mind is that it looks ahead. But it is only the other two that can 'do.'

In speaking of evolution it is necessary to understand from the outset that no mechanical evolution is possible. The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness.

It was his enormous curiosity that kept him alive so long. He had an enormous interest in the world, and I remember, even toward the end, he would get so angry at the paper, angry at the TV.

Nothing is so catching as the plague; now, fanaticism, no matter of what nature, is only the plague of the human mind.

Dreams are like low budget British films in that they're generally badly plotted, packed with gratuitous sex and violence and very sloppily edited. Plus, on average, one person sees them.

Of the pleasures and pains of opium much has been written. The ecstasies and horrors of De Quincey and the paradis artificiels of Baudelaire are preserved and interpreted with an art which makes them immortal, and the world knows well the beauty, the terror and the mystery of those obscure realms into which the inspired dreamer is transported. But much as has been told, no man has yet dared intimate the nature of the phantasms thus unfolded to the mind, or hint at the direction of the unheard-of roads along whose ornate and exotic course the partaker of the drug is so irresistibly borne.

I knew I wouldn't ever trade all this whirling about my head for Russia or heaven or anything on earth.

I cannot reach it, and my striving eye Dazzles at it, as at eternity.

One must talk about everything according to its nature, how it comes to be and how it grows. Men have talked about the world without paying attention to the world of their own minds, as if they were asleep or absent-minded.

The most perfect mind is a dry light.

Such groundless fears will arise in the mind, before it has resumed its vigour after sleep!

Have you watched your thinking? I watched that car go by, it was a blue car. Can I watch my thought in the same way, as it moves from one thing to another? And if it does, find out if it can end; instead of it being a long thread, break it, see what happens. Can you break a thought and say, 'Well, that's enough, enough is enough' and just end that thought and see what happens before the next thought is waiting. Before it springs on you, watch it. In that space, in that interval, what happens? (Brockwood, 1975)

Killer on the road His brain is squirming like a toad.

You are too young to be old...

This crowded world of Space was perfectly real to him. How he had got to it I do not know. Perhaps his mind, dwelling constantly on the problem, had unsealed some atrophied cell and restored the old instinct. Anyhow, he was living his daily life with a foot in each world.

He never went mad in your sense. My dear fellow, you're very much wrong if you think there was anything pathological about him - then. The man was brilliantly sane. His mind was as keen as a keen sword. I couldn't understand him, but I could judge of his sanity right enough.

'In us or through us the Primal Mind will have contemplated and enjoyed its own works and will continue to do so as long as human life endures on this planet.' (p.111)

Maybe the unconscious is overrated... What if your unconscious is full of false consciousness or bad faith? What if it's more like a trash compactor than a dreamcatcher? What if it's a diseased hump, a vampire bat, an alien abductor? Somewhere in Pieces and Pontifications, somebody asked him: 'Why can't the unconscious be as error-prone as the conscious?' It was a Freudian question he never answered.

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in art, in music, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man. And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning blows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken. And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for it is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost. Part 1, Ch. 13

I do believe the sum extent of the messiness, disarrangement, disorder, and dirtiness of your room is equal to that of your brain.

It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tlon comprises only one discipline: psychology. All others are subordinated to it. I have said that the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time.

'Is he in heaven? Is he in hell?' 'There is no heaven. There is no hell.' 'There is no heaven? There is no hell?' 'That's all in your mind.'

There are some minds like either convex or concave mirrors, which represent objects such as they receive them, but never receive them as they are.

There is a physical weakness which stems from mental ability, and a mental weakness which comes from physical ability.

We are afraid of having and showing a small mind and we are not afraid of having and showing a small heart.

For some people, four walls are three too many.

Remember yourself. You've got a Full House in your head tonight...

This little girl inside me Is retreating to her favourite place. Go into the garden. Go under the ivy, Under the leaves, Away from the party. Go right to the rose. Go right to the white rose (For me.)

After a thousand songs on the theme of boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl or Thatcher's Britain, exposure to her music comes as an imaginative release as we go giddily flying into the limitless possibilities of the poetic viewpoint. Here is talk of whales, of Peter Pan, kites, Houdini, mysticism... Acquaintances have observed, 'She lives in a world of her own.' But it's a world that lives within all of us, and her songs shine light into neglected areas of our minds.

We are all sons and daughters of the Most High, but the Anointed One was His first-born, who dwelt in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and He walked among us and we beheld Him. All this I say that you may inderstand not only in the mind but rather in the spirit. The mind weighs and measures but it is the spirit that reaches the heart of life and embraces the secret; and the seed of the spirit is deathless. The wind may blow and then cease, and the sea shall swell and then weary, but the heart of life is a sphere quiet and serene, and the star that shines therein is fixed for evermore.

He ransacked his memory like a thief going through another man's billfold.

Hey - guess what: You're the only creature with free will. How does that make you feel?

Sleep slunk up like a black panther and sank its kindly fangs into what remained of the Mortdecai brain.

A light broke in upon my brain, - It was the carol of a bird; It ceased, and then it came again, The sweetest song ear ever heard.

Ergo vivida vis pervicet et extra processit longe flamentia moenia mundi atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque.

Mind is the root of all sensuality.

This freedom from all attachment is the realisation of God as Truth.

I prize thy gentle heart, Free from ambition, falsehood, or art, And thy good mind, Daily refined, By pure desire To fan the heaven-seeking fire.

Who prop, thou ask'st in these bad days, my mind?

Till their own dreams at length decive 'em, And oft repeating, they believe 'em.

have I been blind have I been lost inside myself and my own mind hypnotized mesmerized by what my eyes have seen?

La pensee console de tout et remedie a tout. Si quelquefois elle vous fait du mal, demandez-lui le remede du mal qu'elle vous a fait, elle vous le donnera.

I am a mariner of Odysseus with heart of fire but with mind ruthless and clear.

With clarity and quiet, I look upon the world and say: All that I see, hear, taste, smell, and touch are the creations of my mind. The sun comes up and the sun goes down in my skull. Out of one of my temples the sun rises, and into the other the sun sets. The stars shine in my brain; ideas, men, animals browse in my temporal head; songs and weeping fill the twisted shells of my ears and storm the air for a moment.

I subdue matter and force it to become my mind's good medium. I rejoice in plants, in animals, in man and in gods, as though they were my children. I feel all the universe nestling about me and following me as though it were my own body.

The moment is ripe: leave the heart and the mind behind you, go forward, take the third step. Free yourself from the simple complacency of the mind that thinks to put all things in order and hopes to subdue phenomena. Free yourself from the terror of the heart that seeks and hopes to find the essence of things. Conquer the last, the greatest temptation of all: Hope. This is the third duty.

I put my body through its paces like a war horse; I keep it lean, sturdy, prepared. I harden it and I pity it. I have no other steed. I keep my brain wide awake, lucid, unmerciful. I unleash it to battle relentlessly so that, all light, it may devour the darkness of the flesh. I have no other workshop where I may transform darkness into light. I keep my heart flaming, courageous, restless. I feel in my heart all commotions and all contradictions, the joys and sorrows of life. But I struggle to subdue them to a rhythm superior to that of the mind, harsher than that of my heart - to the ascending rhythm of the Universe.

You are not a miserable and momentary body; behind your fleeting mask of clay, a thousand-year-old face lies in ambush. Your passions and your thoughts are older than your heart or brain.

All this world, all this rich, endless flow of appearances is not a deception, a multicolored phantasmagoria of our mirroring mind. Nor is it absolute reality which lives and evolves freely, independent of our mind's power. It is not the resplendent robe which arrays the mystic body of God. Nor the obscurely translucent partition between man and mystery. All this world that we see, hear, and touch is that accessible to the human senses, a condensation of the two enormous powers of the Universe permeated with all of God.

Schlafen ist Verdauen der Sinneseindrucke. Traume sind Exkremente.

Have I lost my mind? Or have I, finally, found my heart?

He dreamed, as human beings always dreamed - random firings of memory and imagination that the unconscious mind tries to put together into coherent stories.

Could she help it that she has been given a combination of genes that gave her an extraordinary memory, an enormous capacity for grasping and understanding ideas, and a mind that was able to make connections that no one else could see?

They speak in my mind. Like' - and he hesitated before saying the childhood word - 'Angels.

Illic, precor, optime ductor, famulam tibi praecipe mentem, genitali in sede sacrari quam liquerat exsul et errans.

The tendency in modern civilization is to make the world uniform... Let the mind be universal. The individual should not be sacrificed.

We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

The imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man.

I wish sometimes I wasn't as conscientious as I am.

Imagination is the outreaching of mind . . . . the bombardment of the conscious mind with ideas, impulses, images and every sort of psychic phenomena welling up from the preconscious. It is the capacity to 'dream dreams and see visions . . . .