Quotes About Mind

The self is a mystery. In our efforts to pin it down or make it safe, we dissociate ourselves from our complete experience of whatever it is or is not.

It must be asked here: why does the patient go on being worried by this that belongs to the past? The answer must be that the original experience of primitive agony cannot get into the past tense unless the ego can first gather it into its own present time experience….

In coping with the world, we come to identify only with our compensatory selves and our reactive minds. We build up our selves out of our defenses but then come to be imprisoned by them.

Delusion is the mind's tendency to seek premature closure about something. It is the quality of mind that imposes a definition on things and then mistakes the definition for the actual experience.

We cannot find our enlightened minds while continuing to be estranged from our neurotic ones.

From a Buddhist perspective, there is really nothing but resistance to be analyzed; there is no true self waiting in the wings to be released. Only by revealing the insecurity can a measure of freedom be gained. When we can know our fear as fear and surround it with the patience of Buddha, we can begin to rest in our own minds and approach those to whom we would like to feel close.

Intuitions are not to be ignored, John. They represent data processed too fast for the conscious mind to comprehend.

Travel, though it broadens the mind, narrows the life expectancy.

He was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly. They were stacking up in my head like loaves in the factory where Uncle Terry works. The factory is a bakery and he operates the slicing machines. And sometimes a slicer is not working fast enough but the bread keeps coming and there is a blockage. I sometimes think of my mind as a machine, but not always as a bread-slicing machine. It makes it easier to explain to other people what is going on inside it.

I wanted to go to sleep so that I wouldn't have to think because the only thing I could think was how much it hurt because there was no room for anything else in my head, but I couldn't go to sleep and I just had to sit there and there was nothing to do except to wait and to hurt.

How do you remember this stuff? But why had she forgotten? That was the real question.

like when you wake up at night, and the only sounds you hear are the sounds inside your head.

The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely. How anyone could work in the same office for ten years or bring up children without putting certain things to the back of their mind was beyond him.

You look around and it occurs to you that this isn't real, this is only a memory, that you could let go and topple into that great windy nothing and it wouldn't matter. What frightens you is that for a couple of seconds you can't remember where the present is and how to get back there.

But they are different because the pictures in my head are all pictures of things which really happened. But other people have pictures in their heads of things which aren't real and didn't happen.

Una cosa es interesante porque pensamos en ella, no porque sea nueva.

Y cuando miramos las cosas pensamos que estamos simplemente mirándolas desde nuestros ojos como si mirásemos a través de pequeñas ventanas y que hay una persona dentro de nuestra cabeza, pero no es así. Estamos mirando una pantalla dentro de nuestra cabeza, como la pantalla de un ordenador.

And when we look at things we think we're just looking out of our eyes like we're looking out of little windows and there's a person inside our head, but we're not. We're looking at a screen inside our heads, like a computer screen.

Mind your discipline to read, read to discipline your mind.

the intellect is of no use unless it's disciplined by the mortification of the flesh, so that it may serve the soul.

No matter what it is, if you don't move your eyes and set the pace yourself, your intellect is sentenced to death. The mind, you see, is like a muscle. For it to remain agile and strong, it must work. Television rules that out.

The mind, you see, is like a muscle. For it to remain agile and strong, it must work.

Recollection could be more powerful and more perilous than experience itself.

Isn't it better to think nothing than to think something that is completely idiotic?