Mind Quotes

True Christian fortitude consists in strength of mind, through grace, exerted in two things; in ruling and suppressing the evil and unruly passions and affections of the mind; and in steadfastly and freely exerting and following good affections and dispositions, without being hindered by sinful fear or the opposition of enemies... Though Christian fortitude appears in withstanding and counteracting the enemies that are without us; yet it much more appears in resisting and suppressing the enemies that are within us; because they are our worst and strongest enemies and have greatest advantage against us. The strength of the good soldier of Jesus Christ appears in nothing more than in steadfastly maintaining the holy calm, meekness, sweetness, and benevolence of his mind, amidst all the storms, injuries, strange behaviour, and surprising acts and events of this evil and unreasonable world.

~ Jonathan Edwards

It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.

~ René Descartes

The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell?--buttruth--truth stripped of its cloak of time.

~ Joseph Conrad

Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality-call it an alternate reality-to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw. Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the very maintenance of this chain that produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist.

~ Haruki Murakami

Lose your mind and come to your senses.

~ Frederick Salomon Perls

The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.

~ Michel De Montaigne

In the age of technology there is constant access to vast amounts of information. The basket overflows; people get overwhelmed; the eye of the storm is not so much what goes on in the world, it is the confusion of how to think, feel, digest, and react to what goes on.

~ Criss Jami

It is of great importance, when we begin to practise prayer, not to let ourselves be frightened by our own thoughts.

~ Teresa Of Ávila

Joy blooms where minds and hearts are open.

~ Jonathan Lockwood Huie

That's the way the mind works: the brain is genetically disposed towards organization, yet if not controlled, will link even the most imagerial fragment to another on the flimsiest pretense and in the most freewheeling manner, as if it takes a kind of organic pleasure in creative association, without regards to logic or chronological sequence.

~ Tom Robbins

I thought about having a proper room,breathing life into it, and nobody minding.

~ Jenny Valentine

An active mind cannot exist in an inactive body.

~ George S. Patton Jr.

Part of me wanted this more than anything else in the world—to have someone to hang out with, be like everyone else for a while. The rest of me screamed to get the hell out of there, not to get sucked in.

~ Rachel Ward

Effort within the mind further limits the mind, because effort implies struggle towards a goal and when you have a goal, a purpose, an end in view, you have placed a limit on the mind.

~ Bruce Lee

The word 'innocence' means a mind that is incapable of being hurt.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Always, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much that lies before us. We want a simple world, but we live in a magnificently complex one, and rather than open ourselves to it, we perceive the world through filters that make it less daunting.

~ Dean Koontz

The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.

~ Daniel Kahneman

I would not bend.They could not make me Pliable.My mind was strong.My mind was mine.

~ Janice Hardy

My mind may be sober, but my confidence is high!

~ Habeeb Akande

Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.

~ Marcel Proust

If the mind falls asleep, awaken it. Then if it starts wandering, make it quiet. If you reach the state where there is neither sleep nor movement of mind, stay still in that, the natural (real) state.

~ Ramana Maharshi

Man's mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild.

~ James Allen

O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet is nothing at all - what is it?And where did it come from?And why?

~ Julian Jaynes

Leaving out appraisal also would render the biological description of the phenomena of emotion vulnerable to the caricature that emotions without an appraisal phase are meaningless events. It would be more difficult to see how beautiful and amazingly intelligent emotions can be, and how powerfully they can solve problems for us.

~ António R. Damásio

The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That's the troublewith women,

~ Joanna Russ

Your future is only as bright as your mind is open.

~ Rich Wilkins

If you are ready for the secret, you already possess one half of it,therefore, you will readily recognize the other half the moment it reaches your mind.

~ Napoleon Hill

Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.

~ Virginia Woolf

Since the beginning of time, people have been trying to change the world so that they can be happy. This hasn’t ever worked, because it approaches the problem backward. What The Work gives us is a way to change the projector—mind—rather than the projected. It’s like when there’s a piece of lint on a projector’s lens. We think there’s a flaw on the screen, and we try to change this person and that person, whomever the flaw appears on next. But it’s futile to try to change the projected images. Once we realize where the lint is, we can clear the lens itself. This is the end of suffering, and the beginning of a little joy in paradise.

~ Byron Katie

. . . in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker . . .

~ Charles Dickens

A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced

~ Graham Greene

We move between two darknesses.

~ E.m. Forster

A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.

~ John Henry Newman

Thoughts do more. Words to much. Actions do much more.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

remembering is a great invention of the mind, and if you try hard enough you can remember anything, whether it really happened or not.

~ Rodman Philbrick

As Lucretius says: 'Thus ever from himself doth each man flee.' But what does he gain if he does not escape from himself? He ever follows himself and weighs upon himself as his own most burdensome companion. And so we ought to understand that what we struggle with is the fault, not of the places, but of ourselves

~ Seneca

Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation.

~ Anne Lamott

Normally we divide the external world into that which we consider to be good or valuable, bad or worthless, or neither. Most of the time these discriminations are incorrect or have little meaning. For example, our habitual way of categorizing people as friends, enemies, and strangers depending on how they make us feel is both incorrect and a great obstacle to developing impartial love for all living beings. Rather than holding so tightly to our discriminations of the external world, it would be much more beneficial if we learned to discriminate between valuable and worthless states of mind.

~ Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

I have set off and found that there is no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no sooner begin, than a hundred more appear. Every time I try to narrow down my intent I expand it, and yet those straits and canals still lead me to the open sea, and then I realize how vast it all is, this matter of the mind. I am confounded by the shining water and the size of the world.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Keep your innocence and ignorance aside, and expose yourself to dangerous situations, and understand the deeper secrets of life.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson