Quotes About Mind

Ich habe diese Welt nicht anders vorgefunden als gehüllt in mein Bewusstsein; wie also kann ich gehen, ohne sie mitzunehmen? Und gesetzt selbst, dass sie alle, Berge, Häuser, Sonne (und ich bezweifle es) durch und für andere Wesen fortbestehen, - es werden andere sein, nicht diese Berge, diese Häuser, diese Sonne.

In diesem Moment begriff er, daß niemand den Verstand benutzen wollte. Menschen wollten Ruhe. Sie wollten essen und schlafen, und sie wollten, daß man nett zu ihnen war. Denken wollten sie nicht.

The eyes are not windows. There are nerve impulses, but no one reads them, counts them, translates them, and ruminates about them. Hunt for as long as you want, there's nobody home. The world is contained within you, and you're not there.

Of course it didn't prove anything of the sort, it merely showed that self-examination disturbs the personality, deflects the will, and zaps the mind; it proved that no one, seen clearly from the outside, resembles themselves at all.

This classmate told me that Plato drove this idea home in his dialogue Euthydemus , in which Socrates puts down the Sophists, claiming that a man learns more by "playing" with ideas in his leisure time that by sitting in a classroom. And Plato's successor, that world champion of pleasure, Epicurus, believed in a simple yet elegant connection between learning and happiness: the entire purpose of education was to attune the mind and sense to the pleasures of life.

Rationalism: In epistemology, the theory that truth begins and ends in the mind, not in the senses. It is the ultimate intellectualism, claiming that everything can be figured out deductively. For this to be so, reality has to have an intrinsically logical design; then all we have to do is really think about something and its nature will reveal itself right inside our beans.

through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

Recently, the scientific gods have grown kinder to psychologists.

Don't be discouraged by negative thoughts that may arise unbidden in your mind. You may feel like you should not say or do things that do not feel true in your heart, but such thoughts are destructive and violate biblical secrets of ancient Jewish wisdom.

Pleasure and pain are merely states of mind, rather than situations. Every situation is neutral.

The mind work sometimes in life as it does in a dream. It makes substitutions...

He had managed to lock away everything he didn't want to remember... and the memories returned as well.

The bottom line is this: the brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.

Memory uses the filling-in trick, but imagination is the filling-in trick

The historian Will Durant performed the remarkable feat of summarizing Kant's point in a single sentence: 'The world as we know it is a construction, a finished product, almost–one might say–a manufactured article, to which the mind contributes as much by its moulding forms as the thing contributes by its stimuli.

Time is not an object but an abstraction, hence it does not lend itself to imagery

Desire exists in you as in everything. Realize that it also resides in objects and in all that the mind can grasp. Then, in discovering the universality of desire, enter its radiant space.

When a single object takes an exclusive place in our mind, when our being reaches toward this object in a sort of contracted tension, movement ceases within us and suffering finds its home in us.

Chinul, the twelfth-century Korean Ch'an master, expresses this freedom magnificently in his treatise Secrets of Cultivating the Mind:

A peaceful mind realizes that it has the ability to grasp everything instantaneously. It no longer has to "stockpile" the materials of reality in order to deal with them later. It sees things directly, without projection and without judgment, in all their evidence and obviousness, in their naked reality.

Only firm intent and alert awareness can muster the will-power required to liberate yourself from the simian clutches of the emotional mind, which clings to the human ego as the proverbial 'monkey' of drug addiction clings to addicts.

When the mind is clear and calm, the images it reflects are real and the knowledge it gathers is true. When the mind is agitated and confused, it's like throwing a stone into a still pond, or holding a camera with a shaky hand: the images it reflects are distorted and do not accord with reality.

I realized that most thoughts are impersonal happenings, like self-assembling machines. Unless we train ourselves, the thoughts passing through our mind have little involvement with our will. It is strange to realize that even our own thoughts pass by like scenery out the window of a bus, a bus we took by accident while trying to get somewhere else.

To me, the more I thought about it, the more the dream seemed, intuitively, real—a victory over a residue of her psyche by my unconscious self.