Quotes About Mind

Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life"—he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.

The story of life is the story of the same basic mind readdressing the same problems in the same already discredited ways.

His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked

The mind's first step to self-awareness must be through the body.

Thomas Merton, another solitary, understood that. The beginning of freedom, he wrote, is not liberation from the body but liberation from the mind. We are not entangled in our own body, we are entangled in our mind. I

If we are to die, it will be from internal failures, from the ungovernable dark places of the mind – the scaffolding left over from evolution's bloody building program.

The chaos of the mind cannot constitute a reply to the providence of the universe. All it can be is an awakening in the night, where all that can be heard is anguished poetry let loose.

Il faut vouloir vivre les grands problèmes, par le corps et par l'esprit

C'est en identifiant réalité et quantité que l'esprit humain s'est fait connaissance. Mais il convient de ne pas oublier que la connaissance scientifique, en invalidant des qualités qu'elle fait apparaître illusoires, ne les annule pas pour autant. La quantité c'est la qualité niée, mais non la qualité supprimée.

As soon as you close your eyes, the adventure of sleep begins. -from A Man Asleep

She thought, in touching innocence, that in Miles Calverleigh she had found a friend, and a better one by far than any other, because his mind moved swiftly, because he could make her laugh even when she was out of charity with him, and because of a dozen other attributes which were quite frivolous – hardly attributes at all, in fact – but which added up to a charming total, outweighing the more important faults in his character.

It was seldom that Mr Standen, a peace-loving young gentleman, was conscious of a wish to come to blows with his fellow-men, but a wistful desire to land his cousin a facer did for an instant flicker in his mind.

There is always a thought of marriage between a single female and a personable gentleman, if not in his mind, quite certainly in hers.

Perhaps Charis did not realize that when one had passed through a time of terrible anxiety relief did not immediately restore the tone of one's mind. To be sure, she herself had not expected that after the first raptures she would find herself subject to fits of dejection, and much inclined to be crotchety; but still Charis should have known better than to have enacted a tragical scene within an hour of her arrival.

He then, with great presence of mind, put a stop to any further recriminations by kissing her; and his indignant betrothed, apparently feeling that he was too deeply sunk in depravity to be reclaimable, abandoned (for the time being, at all events) any further attempt to bring him to a sense of his iniquity.

that if you were offered the choice between a splendid body or a splendid mind you would choose the mind, because it would long outlast the body.

An acrimonious dispute between Leslie and Buckingham caused the King to remark to the Lord Talbot somewhat bitterly that although he could not get Leslie's horse to stand by him against the enemy, it seemed that he could not get rid of them now, when he had a mind to it.

I allow you all the vices you choose to claim -- indeed, I know you for a gamester, and a shocking rake, and a man of sadly unsteady character! -- but I'm not so green that I don't recognize in you one virtue and least, and one quality.' 'What, is that all? How disappointing! What are they?' 'A well-informed mind, and a great deal of kindness.

In my experience, the human mind, when under the influence of fear, rushes round in frantic circles.

But time was slipping away; in another minute it would be too late; and urgency acted not as a spur but as a creeping paralysis which clogged the mind, and weighted the tongue, and imposed on desperation a blanket of numb stupidity.

You need not be afraid that I have just fallen in love yesterday. I am quite sure of my mind in this. A month is fully long enough for that.' 'Or a day or an hour,' said the Earl musingly.

Madam Field was not an exhilarating companion, as her mind ran on illness and death, and the froward ways of the younger generation.

Of all the questions in the world I believe What are you thinking about? to be the most impertinent.

As there was no further precaution possible I enjoyed the extraordinary magnificence of the storm with a free mind . . . and all the wonderful and terrible things that happen in high places .