Quotes About Open-mindedness

We live in an age in which the overwhelming majority of people appear to be comfortable with their myopia.

Zen says: be empty. Look without any idea. Look into the nature of things but with no idea, with no prejudice, with no presupposition.

Don't say this is good and that is bad. Drop all discrimination. Accept everything as it is.

No pido tolerancia porque me parece una boludez. [...] La tolerancia es el prejuicio pero más light. Pedir tolerancia es aceptar que algo estás haciendo mal.

When we become simply a promoter or a defender of a particular belief, something within us dies.

It takes God a long time to get us to stop thinking that unless everyone sees things exactly as we do, they must be wrong. That is never God's view.

There are no walls, no bolts, no locks that anyone can put on your mind.

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.

We must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions. We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.

la creencia de que se vive en la posesión de un librito que solo conoce de la verdad. Hombres peligrosos los del cavernario fanatismo, que no creen en el valor de la duda, en las virtudes del desconcierto, en la pesadumbre del error propio repetido.

Open your mind and clear it of all thoughts that would deceive.

Never assume that you know the mind of another.

The world had become a much more interesting place, filled with fellow travelers whose joys and sorrows he no longer disdained to know and whose shortcomings he was far more inclined to overlook.

The writer Anne Lamott says, "You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."28

We are not going to confine women to the home, cover their heads, lengthen their skirts, or beat up gay people, prohibit alcohol, censure film, theater, and literature, and codify tolerance in order to respect the overly sensitive whims of a few sanctimonious persons.

I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.

If your horse says no, you either asked the wrong question, or asked the question wrong.

If you only read what you agree with, you'll never learn anything. - James D. Hodgson

How can you know it's the best, if you don't learn about anything else?

I'm sorry. I'm used to people objecting to things because they think I can't do them or shouldn't do them. It didn't occur to me that you might have a real reason.

We need to enter the conversation willing to be wrong, willing to admit the limits of our own knowledge, willing to reconsider our evidence, sources, and premises. That is self-skepticism.

Trust your imagination. There is always something in the box.

Very few people want to know the truth. They wish to be confirmed in their own opinions, which is a very different thing—very different indeed.

Let's be honest, you've probably encountered somebody with an opinion that made you scratch your head, to say the least. Here's the thing though: a great conversationalist can always find some common ground, can be respectful, lighthearted, curious and kind…without agreeing in the least with their conversation partner. It's all about prioritizing enjoyable human connection over the need to agree or be right.