Mind Quotes

A timid mind is apt to mistake every scratch for a mortal wound.

~ George Gordon Byron

It's the mind that sees, not eyes.

~ Toba Beta

The mind creates those things that exist.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

The first step in conforming our intellect to God's truth is to die to our vanity, pride, and craving for respect from colleagues and the public. We must let go of the worldly motivations that drive us, praying to be motivated solely by a genuine desire to submit our minds to God's Word - and then to use that knowledge in service to others.

~ Nancy Pearcey

The body is the outermost layer of the mind.

~ David Mitchell

If you can't change your mind, you can't change anything.

~ Orna Ross

The skeptic says that the believer has lost his own mind under God. On the contrary, it is the people who follow God who are most like his children, who willingly and consciously walk in his will; but those who oppose him oppose him vainly and at their own expense, and, figuratively, seem to be more like his tools. They don't diminish his glory, but instead he still manages to use them in ways of unconsciously carrying out his will.

~ Criss Jami

I step back further, until I feel cold tiles against my back. It is then I get the glimmer that I associate with memory. As my mind tries to settle on it, it flutters away, like ashes caught in a breeze, and I realize that in my life there is a then, a before, though before what I cannot say, and there is a now, and there is nothing between the two but a long, silent emptiness that has led me here, to me and him, in this house.

~ S.j. Watson

but her mind feels feverish as it races through the crowded hallways of the past

~ Thrity Umrigar

Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.

~ George Orwell

What we believe is heavily influenced by what we think others believe

~ Thomas Gilovich

But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or feet performed, and if he did nothing at all, heard and saw nothing, the shouting of some triumphant inner voice that shocked him and cowed him.

~ Patricia Highsmith

It is true that the subliminal in man is the largest part of his nature and has in it the secret of the unseeen dynamisms which explain his surface activities. But the lower vital subconscious which is all that this psycho-analysis of Freud seems to know, - and of that it knows only a few ill-lit corners, - is no more than a restricted and very inferior portion of the subliminal whole... to begin by opening up the lower subconscious, risking to raise up all that is foul or obscure in it, is to go out of one's way to invite trouble.

~ Sri Aurobindo

Athletes need to enjoy their training. They don't enjoy going down to the track with a coach making them do repetitions until they're exhausted. From enjoyment comes the will to win.

~ Arthur Lydiard

Perhaps you are just close to what you have been waiting for all along and ideas start formulating in your mind and advising you to give up. Tell them not me.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind - to take a partial or local truth, generalise it unduly and try to explain a whole field of nature in its narrow terms - runs riot here (in psychoanalysis). Moreover, the exaggeration of the importance of suppressed sexual complexes is a dangerous falsehood.

~ Sri Aurobindo

If you want to be sure of unusual thing such as aliens or UFOs, then you have to think about it from an unusual way of thinking.

~ Toba Beta

Golden eagles don`t mate with bald eagles, deer don`t mate with antelope, gray wolves don`t mate with red wolves. Just look at domesticated animals, at mongrel dogs, and mixed breed horses, and you`ll know the Great Mystery didn`t intend them to be that way. We weakened the species and introduced disease by mixing what should be kept seperate. Among humans, intermarriage weakens the respect people have for themselves and for their traditions. It undermines clarity of spirit and mind.

~ Russell Means

The neural basis for the self, as I see it, resides with the continuous reactivation of at least two sets of representations. One set concerns representations of key events in an individual's autobiography, on the basis of which a notion of identity can be reconstructed repeatedly, by partial activation in topologically organized sensory maps. ... In brief, the endless reactivation of updated images about our identity (a combination of memories of the past and of the planned future) constitutes a sizable part of the state of self as I understand it.The second set of representations underlying the neural self consists of the primordial representations of an individual's body ... Of necessity, this encompasses background body states and emotional states. The collective representation of the body constitute the basis for a concept of self, much as a collection of representations of shape, size, color, texture, and taste can constitute the basis for the concept of orange.

~ António R. Damásio

Ամբողջ մարմնի կենդանութիւնը հոգին է, իսկ մարմինն ու հոգին կառավարողը՝ միտքն է:The whole essence of the body is the spirit, while the governor of both spirit and body is the mind.

~ Saint Vardapet Eghishē

Curiosity is the hunger of the mind.

~ Lance Conrad

Emotional baggage,” which is carried over from the past, colors our perceptions. Likewise, past conclusions and beliefs, based on reasoning that may or may not have been accurate, also tint our perception of reality. Retaining our capacity for reason is common sense, but definite conclusions and beliefs keep us from seeing life as it really is at any given moment.Emotional reactions can be unreasonable, and reason can be flawed. It’s difficult to have deep confidence in either one, especially when they’re often at war with each other. But the universal mind exists in the instant, in a moment beyond time, and it sees the universe as it literally is. It’s the universe perceiving itself. It is, moreover, something we can have absolute confidence in, and with that confidence, we can maintain a genuinely positive attitude.

~ H.e. Davey

What chance combination of shadow and sound and his own thoughts had created it?

~ Patricia Highsmith

Because you don't learn anything unless you can find the patience to read. TV takes that away from you. It robs you from your mind.

~ Markus Zusak

The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.’ That will be useful.

~ Virginia Woolf

So that it must be only by the imagination that Satan has access to the soul, to tempt and delude it, or suggest anything to it. And this seems to be the reason why persons that are under the disease of melancholy are commonly so visibly and remarkably subject to the suggestions and temptations of Satan... Innumerable are the ways by which the mind may be led on to all kind of evil thoughts, by the exciting of external ideas in the imagination.

~ Jonathan Edwards

It was as if the main screw in his head, which held his whole life together, had become stripped. The screw would not go in, would not come out, but turned in the same groove without catching hold, and it was impossible to stop turning it.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Enclosed within the tyranny of our minds and there is where we are lost.

~ Robert Dodson

The reassuring smile was now useless. I was plastic. Everything was veiled. Objectivity, facts, hard information--these were things only in the outline stage. There was nothing tying anything together yet, so the mind built up a defense, and the evidence was restructured, and that was what I tried to do on that morning--to restructure the evidence so it made sense--and that is what I failed at.

~ Bret Easton Ellis

I don't seem able to get it straight in my mind....

~ Ken Kesey

It is said that love does not last, that it is just a momentary spell cast upon your soul by some higher power, or a small trick of the mind. If this were all true, there would be no story to tell.

~ Natalie Valdes

The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

there're times when i suspect that the mind has a mind of its own. it shows us pictures. pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. this mind's mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice

~ David Mitchell

Consciousness does not just passively reflect the objective material world, it plays an active role in creating realityitself.

~ Stanislav Grof

Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues.

~ John Dewey

I may err but I am not a heretic, for the first has to do with the mind and the second with the will!

~ Meister Eckhart

He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass: environment is but a looking glass.

~ James Allen

it seems that once again people engage in a search for evidence that is biased toward confirmation. Asked to assess the similarity of two entities, people pay more attention to the ways in which they are similar than to the ways in which they differ. Asked to assess dissimilarity, they become more concerned with differences than with similarities. In other words, when testing a hypothesis of similarity, people look for evidence of similarity rather than dissimilarity, and when testing a hypothesis of dissimilarity, they do the opposite. The relationship one perceives between two entities, then, can vary with the precise form of the question that is asked

~ Thomas Gilovich

Assumptions are quick exits for lazy minds that like to graze out in the fields without bother.

~ Suzy Kassem

But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?

~ Charles Darwin