Quotes About Mind

For the one belief we all carry with us, no matter how rational we claim to be, is a belief in our own free will.

California was almost entirely a dream, a dream vague but deep in the minds of a westering people.

To dream anything that you want to dream. That's the beauty of the human mind. To do anything that you want to do. That is the strength of the human will. To trust yourself to test your limits. That is the courage to succeed.

Although [D. T.] Suzuki's apparently free-floating, and certainly contradictory, discourse may be charitably interpreted as reflecting the "unlocalized" mind of the enlightened master, it can also appear as a situational reflex to "cash in" on both sides of every issue.

It is not matter that creates an illusion of consciousness, but consciousness that creates an illusion of matter.

Discipline strengthens the mind so that it becomes impervious to the corroding influence of fear.

Where to look if you've lost your mind?

La pygmée Nuçx'ia se dit que la nature a beaucoup moins de limites que l'esprit humain. La jeune gemme songe que la vie aime qu'on joue avec elle, elle n'est pas conservatrice, elle est ludique.

Qué creías que era vivir? ¿Creérselo todo y echarse a dormir? (P. 7)

We often think that to be spiritual or enlightened we need to have some special experiences, just as we think that in order to make a great meal or become a master chef we need special ingredients and a fancy kitchen. But all we have to do to make a meal is put all the pots and pans and ingredients in their proper places. And all we have to do to be in touch with our spirituality is to let the mind settle itself, like a cloudy glass of city tap water.

Gail Delaney's Living Your Dreams, Ann Faraday's The Dream Game, and Patricia Garfield's Creative Dreaming. Jung's

For what's the use of talking with a man who has a disease and thinks about the stars?

A Man lives off his head. His head won't see him through. Inspect your own— What lives on that? At most, a louse or two . . .

Das Denken gehört zu den größten Vergnügungen der menschlichen Rasse.

the social scientist who lacks a mathematical mind and regards a mathematical formula as a magic recipe, rather than as the formulation of a supposition, does not hold forth much promise. A mathematical formula is never more than a precise statement. […] The chief merit of mathematization is that it compels us to become conscious of what we are assuming.

Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, the chief glory of man.

The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways.

A man bears the weight of his own body without knowing it, but he soon feels the weight of any other object. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that a man cannot forget- but not himself.

The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit root yug, which means "to yoke or harness." Since 500 B.C., yoga has traditionally referred to the art of "yoking." or hooking up, the lower (or individual) consciousness with the higher (or universal) consciousness. Over the centuries the word yoga has also been used to mean "union," and often refers not only to the union between lower and higher levels of consciousness, but union between mind and body.

Thought is power -- real, objective power. Moreover, the thoughts we create have a life of their own. They have a kind of material reality that affects other people for good or ill -- hence our responsibility to chose.

There appears, also, to be a possibility of a mind in Nature, although we have seen that intelligence is, strictly speaking, impossible. There cannot be perception, memory, comparison, or judgment; but may there not be a perfect mind, unchanging, calm, and still?

That was the trouble of being old. Your body no longer obeyed you. It did unruly and unreasonable things. An eye suddenly might not see for a moment. Your knees gave out at the wrong time, so that when you thought you were walking north, you might find yourself going a little northwest. Your brain, too, had that same flighty trick. You might be speaking of something and forget it temporarily,—your mind going off at a little to the northwest, too, so to speak.

Then human mind holds tight to those things it can't reconcile.

Make no mistake," the anthropologist Loren Eiseley once said. "Everything in the mind is in rat's country. It doesn't die.