Selected mind quotes

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

2. Man is a genius when he is dreaming.

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

4. 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.

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

6. 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.

7. Don't leave home without your sword - your intellect.

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

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

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

13. Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.

14. All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

15. It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

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

17. The soul never thinks without a picture.

18. 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.

19. I want to reach your mind - where is it currently located?

20. My mind contains many good ideas, but it's not always easy to squeeze one out.

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

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

23. 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.

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

25. 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.

26. Keep violence in the mind where it belongs.

27. 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.

28. 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.

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

30. 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.

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

32. Genius is one of the many forms of insanity.

33. 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.

34. 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.

35. Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.

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

37. Freedom begins between the ears.

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

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

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

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

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

43. 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 . . . .

44. The human imagination leaps to form the whole, to complete the scene in order to make sense of it. The instantaneous way this is done shows how we are driven to construct the remainder of the scene. To fill the gaps is essential if the scene is to have meaning. That we may do this in misleading ways-at times in neurotic or paranoid ways-does not gainsay the central point. Our passion for form expresses our yearning to make the world adequate to our needs and desires, and, more important, to experience ourselves as having significance.

45. A person can be a God-fearing Christian on Sunday and a working scientist come Monday morning, without ever having to account for the partition that seems to have erected itself in his head while he slept.

46. Do you ever think? The voice, God forbid.

47. Ah if only this voice could stop, this meaningless voice which prevents you from being nothing, just barely prevents you from being nothing and nowhere, just enough to keep alight this little yellow flame feebly darting from side to side, panting, as if straining to tear itself from its wick, it should never have been lit, or it should never have been fed, or it should have been put out, put out, it should have been let go out.

48. And weave fine cobwebs, fit for skull That's empty when the moon is full; Such as take lodgings in a head That's to be let unfurnished.

49. With these celestial Wisdom calms the mind, And makes the happiness she does not find.

50. Our myriad-minded Shakespeare.

51. Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of.

52. Included in this 'almost nothing,' as a kind of geological afterthought of the last few million years, is the first development of self-conscious intelligence on this planet-an odd and unpredictable invention of a little twig on the mammalian evolutionary bush. Any definition of this uniqueness, embedded as it is in our possession of language, must involve our ability to frame the world as stories and to transmit these tales to others. If our propensity to grasp nature as story has distorted our perceptions, I shall accept this limit of mentality upon knowledge, for we receive in trade both the joys of literature and the core of our being.

53. One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling... which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment. We have more or less the same bodies, but very different kinds of thoughts. I believe that we think much more with the instruments provided by our culture than we do with our bodies, and hence the much greater diversity of thought in the world. Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking.

54. It is the cheerful mind that is persevering. It is the strong mind that hews its way through a thousand difficulties.

55. The important thing is: how much less you think of the body, of yourself as matter-as dead, dull, insentient matter; how much more you think of yourself as shining immortal being.

56. Religion does not mean just precepts, a temple, monastery, or other external signs, for these as well as hearing and thinking are subsidiary factors in taming the mind. When the mind becomes the practices, one is a practitioner of religion, and when the mind does not become the practices one is not.

57. Bodhicitta is the medicine which revives and gives life to every sentient being who even hears of it. When you engage in fulfilling the needs of others, your own needs are fulfilled as a by-product.

58. 'Mind arose out of existence, as an organ for keeping alive. In reflecting existence, however, it becomes at the same time something else. The existent negates itself as thought upon itself. Such negation is mind's element.'

59. 'The conventional mind is at best a petty piece of machinery. It is oyster-like in its functioning, or, perhaps better, clam-like. It has its little siphon of thought-processes forced up or down into the mighty ocean of fact and circumstance; but it uses so little, pumps so faintly, that the immediate contiguity of the vast mass is not disturbed. Nothing of the subtlety of life is perceived. Not least inkling of its storms or terrors is ever discovered except through accident.'

60. Aggressive Fancy working spells Upon a mind o'erwrought.

61. The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's time.

62. What outcries pluck me from my naked bed And chill my throbbing heart with trembling fear.

63. I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between the physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori. Opinion is strongly divided on the credibility of some kind of functionalist reductionism, and I won't go through my reasons for being on the antireductionist side of that debate. Despite significant attempts by a number of philosophers to describe the functional manifestations of conscious mental states, I continue to believe that no purely functionalist characterization of a system entails-simply in virtue of our mental concepts-that the system is conscious.

64. C'est une plaisante chose que la pensee depende absolument de l'estomac, et malgre cela les meilleurs estomacs ne soient pas les meilleurs penseurs.

65. Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea Of this invention, this invented world, The inconceivable idea of the sun. You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it. Never suppose an inventing mind as source Of this idea nor for that mind compose A voluminous master folded in his fire.

66. Without a name and nothing to be desired, If only imagined but imagined well.

67. Apotheosis is not The origin of the major man. He comes, Compact in invincible foils, from reason, Lighted at midnight by the studious eye, Swaddled in revery, the object of The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind...

68. A fictive covering Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.

69. We reason of these things with later reason And we make of what we see, what we see clearly And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.

70. The nothingness was a nakedness, a point, Beyond which fact could not progress as fact. Thereon the learning of the man conceived Once more night's pale illuminations, gold Beneath, far underneath, the surface of His eye and audible in the mountain of His ear, the very material of his mind.

71. You remain the more than natural figure. You Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational Distortion, however fragrant, however dear. That's it: the more than rational distortion, The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.

72. At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind. He knew that he heard it, A bird's cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind.

73. Halp! My powerful brain is blowed itself up!

74. My bug brain is ever whirrin.

75. A mind that has confronted ruin for years Is half or more a ruined mind.

76. But that disease when soberly defined Is the false fire of an o'erheated mind.

77. To remember something or to invent something, it comes to the same thing.

78. Endurance is mind over matter.

79. The engaged mind stays sharp and retains tremendous capacity.

80. 'His thoughts like a hundred moths, trapped in a lampshade.'

81. If a made-up mind counts as a teacher, then who doesn't have a teacher?

82. The more I ponder God's way, the more I believe He changes a person, or molds a person, through enlightenment. He changes a person's mind.

83. Buddhism does not accept a theory of God, or a creator. According to Buddhism, one's own actions are the creator, ultimately. Some people say that, from a certain angle, Buddhism is not a religion but rather a science of mind. Religion has much involvement with faith. Sometimes it seems that there is quite a distance between a way of thinking based on faith and one entirely based on experiment, remaining skeptical. Unless you find something through investigation, you do not want to accept it as fact. From one viewpoint, Buddhism is a religion, from another viewpoint Buddhism is a science of mind and not a religion. Buddhism can be a bridge between these two sides. Therefore, with this conviction I try to have closer ties with scientists, mainly in the fields of cosmology, psychology, neurobiology and physics. In these fields there are insights to share, and to a certain extent we can work together.

84. -You know what Aquinas says: The three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry and radiance. Some day I will expand that sentence into a treatise. Consider the performance of your own mind when confronted with any object, hypothetically beautiful. Your mind to apprehend that object divides the entire universe into two parts, the object, and the void which is not the object. To apprehend it you must lift it away from everything else: and then you perceive that it is one integral thing, that is a thing. You recognise its integrity. Isn't that so? - And then? -That is the first quality of beauty: it is declared in a simple sudden synthesis of the faculty which apprehends. What then? Analysis then. The mind considers the object in whole and in part, in relation to itself and to other objects, examines the balance of its parts, contemplates the form of the object, traverses every cranny of the structure. So the mind receives the impression of the symmetry of the object. The mind recognises that the object is in the strict sense of the word, a thing, a definitely constituted entity. You see? - Let us turn back, said Cranly.

85. I think it is fairly clear why none of us do experience something beyond the mere watching. There may be rare moments of an emotional state in which we see, as it were, the clarity of the sky between clouds, but I do not mean anything of that kind. All such experiences are temporary and have very little significance. The questioner wants to know why, after these many years of watching, he hasn't found the deep waters. Why should he find them? Do you understand? You think that by watching your own thoughts you are going to get a reward: if you do this, you will get that. You are really not watching at all, because your mind is concerned with gaining a reward. You think that by watching, by being aware, you will be more loving, you will suffer less, be less irritable, get something beyond; so your watching is a process of buying. With this coin you are buying that, which means that your watching is a process of choice; therefore it isn't watching, it isn't attention. To watch is to observe without choice, to see yourself as you are without any movement of desire to change, which is an extremely arduous thing to do; but that doesn't mean that you are going to remain in your present state. You do not know what will happen if you see yourself as you are without wishing to bring about a change in that which you see. Do you understand?

86. Throughout theological history we have been assured by religious leaders that if we perform certain rituals, repeat certain prayers or mantras, conform to certain patterns, suppress our desires, control our thoughts, sublimate our passions, limit our appetites and refrain from sexual indulgence, we shall, after sufficient torture of the mind and body, find something beyond this little life. And that is what millions of so-called religious people have done through the ages, either in isolation, going off into the desert or into the mountains or a cave or wandering from village to village with a begging bowl, or, in a group, joining a monastery, forcing their minds to conform to an established pattern. But a tortured mind, a broken mind, a mind which wants to escape from all turmoil, which has denied the outer world and been made dull through discipline and conformity-such a mind, however long it seeks, will find only according to its own distortion.

87. 'Man's craving for the supernatural is as natural as our discounting of the present moment... The natural becomes trite and commonplace to us and we take refuge in an imaginary world above and beyond it.' (p.261}

88. Ophelia's mind went wandering you'd wonder where she'd gone through secret doors down corridors she'd wander them alone

89. And then [he] wondered why he would think of such a useless question at a time like this

90. Under the conditions of modern life we have more control over our thoughts, and in connection with this there is a special method by which we may work on the development of our consciousness using that instrument which is most obedient to our will; that is, our mind, or the intellectual centre. In order to understand more clearly what I am going to say, you must try to remember that we have no control over our consciousness. When I said that we can become more conscious, or that a man can be made conscious for a moment simply by asking him if he is conscious or not, I used the words 'conscious' or 'consciousness' in a relative sense. There are so many degrees of consciousness and every higher degree means 'consciousness' in relation to a lower degree. But, if we have no control over consciousness itself, we have a certain control over our thinking about consciousness, and we can construct our thinking in such a way as to bring consciousness. What I mean is that by giving to our thoughts the direction which they would have in a moment of consciousness, we can, in this way, induce consciousness.

91. I dim the lights... and think about you Spend sleepless nights... to think about you You said you loved me... or were you just being kind? Or am I losing my mind?

92. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path. The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

93. There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain, So many clappers going without bells, That these bethous compose a heavenly gong. One voice repeating, one tireless chorister, The phrases of a single phrase, ke-ke, A single text, granite monotony

94. This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, Out of all the indifferences, into one thing

95. Then he struggled with the mind; His proud heart he left behind. Now his wars on God begin; At stroke of midnight God shall win. Supernatural Songs, IX, The Four Ages of Man

96. Sometimes I wonder what goes on inside her mind

97. It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word.

98. The human mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with a similar energy.

99. Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

100. It is also possible within this lifetime to enhance the power of the mind, enabling one to reaccess memories from previous lives. Such recollection tends to be more accessible during meditative experiences in the dream state. Once one has accessed memories of previous lives in the dream state, one gradually recalls them in the waking state.