Quotes About Mind

It was an odd thing Tam had taught him. Concentrate on a single flame and feed all your passions into it—fear, hate, anger—until your mind became empty. Become one with the void, Tam said, and you could do anything.

Our brains are either our greatest assets or our greatest liabilities.

Be careful what you learn because your mind is so powerful that you become what you put in your head.

hypocrisy never, to my mind, wears so disgusting a garb as when it attires itself in the outward show of religion.

This means that he has an unconquerable spirit, that he has great courage, that he is fearless, that he takes responsibility for his actions, and that he has self-discipline. Discipline means that he has the rigor to develop control and mastery over his mind and over his body, and that he has the capacity to withstand pain, both psychological and physical.

The mind plays tricks. It rejects things until it thinks ? or something tells it ? that the remembering can be handled.

exhausted people do not make the best decisions.

In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty...

If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas

It was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.

The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.

Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it.

Of course, the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people's minds. It's best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you're safe. That doesn't leave you very much to believe in, but that's scientific too.

To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting.

When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.

The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws—which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior.

the idea that one person's mind is accessible to another's is just a conversational illusion, just a figure of speech, an assumption that makes some kind of exchange between basically alien creatures seem plausible, and that really the relationship of one person to another is ultimately unknowable.

Peace of mind isn't at all superficial to technical work. It's the whole thing. That which produces it is good work and that which destroys it is bad work. The specs, the measuring instruments, the quality control, the final check-out, these are all means toward the end of satisfying the peace of mind of those responsible for the work. What really counts in the end is their peace of mind, nothing else.

From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it.

His work was just barely passing by academic standards at this time, but this wasn't because he wasn't working or thinking. He was thinking too hard, and the harder you think in this high country of the mind the slower you go. Phaedrus read in a scientific way rather than a literary way, testing each sentence as he went along, noting doubts and questions to be resolved later, and I'm fortunate in having a whole trunkful of volumes of these notations

Actually, a root word of technology, techne , originally meant art. The ancient Greeks never separated art from manufacture in their minds, and so never developed separate words for them.

They contain no matter," I continue, "and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people's minds.

the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That's why you need the peace of mind.

It's been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an understanding of nature's order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from.