Quotes about mind

page 17

“One afternoon, which is ever present in my recollection, I was enjoying a walk with my friend in the city park and reciting poetry. At that age I knew entire books by heart, word for word. One of these was Goethe's Faust. The sun was just setting and reminded me of a glorious passage:
Sie rückt und weicht, der Tag ist überlebt,
Dort eilt sie hin und fördert neues Leben.
O! daß kein Flügel mich vom Boden hebt,
Ihr nach und immer nach zu streben!
Ein schöner Traum, indessen sie entweicht.
Ach! zu des Geistes Flügeln wird so leicht
Kein körperlicher Flügel sich gesellen![The glow retreats, done is the day of toil;
It yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring;
Ah, that no wing can lift me from the soil
Upon its track to follow, follow soaring!
A glorious dream! though now the glories fade.
Alas! the wings that lift the mind no aid
Of wings to lift the body can bequeath me.
(tr. Bayard Taylor)
As I uttered these inspiring words the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagram shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and my companion understood them perfectly. The images I saw were wonderfully sharp and clear and had the solidity of metal and stone, so much so that I told him, "See my motor here; watch me reverse it."”

“You now have learned enough to see
That Cats are much like you and me
And other people whom we find
Possessed of various types of mind.
For some are sane and some are mad
And some are good and some are bad
And some are better, some are worse —
But all may be described in verse.”

“The Hindus have not the slightest affinity towards you, as they have towards Muslims. They consider Muslims closer than you. Hindus and Muslims are helpful to each other in local boards, in legislative councils, and in business. But is there a single instance of such sympathetic consideration shown towards you by the caste Hindus? On the contrary: they always cultivate hatred against you in their minds. What dreadful effects this hatred has produced, can be heard from those who have had occasion to go to the court for justice or to the police for help.”

“My expectation is that our families package, which we will be introducing as a matter of priority will have the effect of lifting tens of thousands of children out of poverty. From there, though, I want to establish clear targets. We’ve always said that we want them put in legislation, and every year we will then report, as part of the Public Finance Act, on how much progress we’ve made. So, I can say now that, yes, I wanted to match their 100,000, but I want incremental goals to hold us to account. In my mind, some of the targets that we’ve set ourselves, some of the goals that we measure ourselves on as a society, don’t take into account the effects on individuals, on their wellbeing. This will be a government that takes into account those markers, and the wellbeing of people will be my sign of success.”

“Whether or not we can get together, remember well that art “lives” where absolute freedom is. With all the training thrown to nowhere, with a mind (if there is such a verbal substance) perfectly unaware of its own working, with the “self” vanishing nowhere, the art of JKD attains its perfection.”

“Be unhoused, O my soul!
Only the Infinite be your goal.

Leave those myriad forms behind,
Leave the million names that bind.
A flash will pierce your heart and mind,
And unhouse you, O my soul!”

“Mankind undervalues VISUALIZATION, because we have been lead to believe that thoughts are the cast off abstractions of the brain. But visualization is source's attribute of creation which is acting through the mind of mankind. As extensions of source, whenever we visualize, we bring forth the essence of what we visualize into visible, tangible, physical experience. No form ever came into existence without someone consciously holding a picture of that form first in his or her thoughts.”

“People with dirty minds make better lovers.”

“The weak and feeble-minded are drawn to the evil strongman as it provides them a sense of power they could not otherwise achieve.”

“Just as camphor is consumed by the flames of fire, so also, mind must be consumed by soul-fire.”

“The great Zen master Rinzai, in order to take his students' attention away from time, would often raise his finger and slowly ask: "What, at this moment, is lacking?" A powerful question that does not require an answer on the level of the mind. It is designed to take your attention deeply into the Now. A similar question in the Zen tradition is this: "If not now, when?"”

“The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now.... You'll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.”

“Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath. Or when a dark mood comes upon you and you start getting into a negative mind-pattern and thinking how dreadful your life is, your thinking has become aligned with the pain-body, and you have become unconscious and vulnerable to the pain-body's attack. "Unconscious," the way that I use the word here, means to be identified with some mental or emotional pattern. It implies a complete absence of the watcher.”

“The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life....The pain that you create now is always some form of non acceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity.”

“Instead of "watching the thinker," you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation. In your everyday life, you can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your fullest attention, so that it becomes an end in itself.”

“As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence - your deeper self - behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking. When a thought subsides, you experience a discontinuity in the mental stream - a gap of "no-mind." At first, the gaps will be short, a few seconds perhaps, but gradually they will become longer. When these gaps occur, you feel a certain stillness and peace inside you.”

“Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person's own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease.”

“What was the point in continuing to live with this burden of misery? Why carry on with this continuous struggle? I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to continue to live. “I cannot live with myself any longer.” This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. “Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with.” “Maybe,” I thought, “only one of them is real.””

“Apathetic Ignorance

When someone tells you something, you know is false and thus displays their ignorance; and you’re not in the frame of mind or mood to challenge them; so, you just say; really.”

“Always be mindful, one has complete authority over psyche, words, and actions. Deliberative judgment of these three things, determine your station in life.”

“Small, minded people rarely have ideas, just a litany of excuses and complaints.”

“The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.”

“Nine hundred feet below my cave rhododendrons blossomed. I climbed barren mountain-tops. Long tramps led me to desolate valleys studded with translucent lakes... Solitude, solitude! ...Mind and senses develop their sensibility in this contemplative life made up of continual observations and reflections. Does one become a visionary or, rather, is it not that one has been blind until then?”

“The seed comes when the field is ready, greatness comes when the mind is ready.”

“Mind...cleansed through sadhana (spiritual practices)...serves as a perfect reflector of the spiritual reality.”

“Radical Islam, by the grace of God, is not spreading across Russia. These and other radically-minded people pose a huge danger to Russia. This is why everything that happens in the Middle East, in Syria, Iraq, Libya, concerns us very closely.”

“A person must have lost his mind to believe in God. The product of either fear or weakness, this abominable phantom, Eugenie, is useless for the system of the earth, It would even be infallibly harmful. You see, its will, which must be just, could never ally itself with the injustice essential to the laws of nature. It would constantly have to wish for goodness, which nature desires only as compensation for the evil that serves its laws. It would have to act continuously, and nature, one of whose laws is that perpetual motion, could only rival and perpetually resist it.”

“It comforts me to know that anything I put my mind to, and pursue, I can achieve.”

“What the exploiter needs is that the will and intelligence of the victim be disengaged from the projects of resistance and escape but that they not be simply broken or destroyed. Ideally, the dis-integration and mis-integration of the victim should accomplish the detachment of the victim's will and intelligence from the victim’s own interests and their attachment to the interests of the exploiter. This will effect a displacement or dissolution of self-respect and will undermine the victim’s intolerance of coercion. With that, the situation transcends the initial paradigmatic form or structure of coercion; for if people don’t mind doing what you want them to do, then, in a sense, you can’t really be making them do it. In the limiting case, the victim’s will and intelligence are wholly transferred to a full engagement in the pursuit of the dominating person’s interests. The “problem” had been that there were two parties with divergent interests; this sort of solution (which is very elegant, as that word is used in logic) is to erase the conflict by reducing the number of interested parties to one. This radical solution can properly be called “enslavement.””

“It is better, then, to save the work while it is begun. You have done the labor; maintain it—keep it. If men choose to serve you, go with them; but as you have made up your organization upon principle, stand by it; for, as surely as God reigns over you, and has inspired your mind, and given you a sense of propriety and continues to give you hope, so surely you will still cling to these ideas, and you will at last come back again after your wanderings, merely to do your work over again.”

“Nothing can stop you when you put your mind to it.”

“Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.”

“It all depends on whether you're willing to invest time and effort in and put your mind to. That's what separates winners from losers.”

“There is an aliveness in you that you can feel with your Being, not just in the head. Every cell is alive in that presence in which you don't need to think. Yet, in that state, if thought is required for some practical purpose, it is there. The mind can still operate, and it operated beautifully when the greater intelligence that you are uses it and expresses itself through it.”

“Always keep your mind as bright and clear as the vast sky, the great ocean, and the highest peak, empty of all thoughts. Always keep your body filled with light and heat. Fill yourself with the power of wisdom and enlightenment.”

“Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.”

“To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one's family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one's own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.”

“He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.”

“If you correct your mind, the rest of your life will fall into place.”

“Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation... even so does inaction sap the vigour of the mind.”

“I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.”

“'The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.' That's from Emerson, by the way. All I was hoping to do is stretch some goddamn minds.”

“All history and its best minds have declared there is no more vile form of government than democracy.”

“Holy Scripture presents a kind of mirror to the eyes of the mind, so that our inner face may be seen in it. There we learn our own ugliness, there our own beauty.”

“I do see one large and grievous kind of ignorance, separate from the rest, and as weighty as all the other parts put together. Thinking that one knows a thing when one does not know it. Through this, I believe, all the mistakes of the mind are caused in all of us.”

“After taking a while to meditate upon the motto of our generation. I came to the ultimate conclusion that our minds are mainly focused on wealth and health.”

“For God does not need a picture, nor any physical attributes that you may imagine inside your limited mind.”

“I believe that the mind is the last planet that’s left unexplored—Achieving the universal or cosmic consciousness is the highest goal to mankind.”

“I am not the body, but I still use the physical aspect to count the blessings of the Creator. I am not the mind, but I always use it to realise the Most High and the attachments of this bodily world.”

“The fallen angels took full responsibility. I don't think anyone tempted the devil to rebel in the first place. He just made up his own mind.”

“Your mind and soul will never find rest until the day you decide to feed them the truth.”

“The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized.”

“There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.”

“If you must be careless with your possessions, let it be in connection with material things. Your mind is your spiritual estate! Protect and use it with the care to which Divine Royalty is entitled. You were given a will-power for this purpose.”

“They really need discipline, to be objective, to know what they really want in life. If you train with the mind of winning you always win, if you train with a weak mind, no I am just doing it for the sake of running then something is wrong somewhere.”

“Isn't it lovely, all alone
Heart made of glass, my mind of stone
Tear me to pieces, skin to bone
Hello, welcome home”

“For some reason, I'm the guy people love to hate, which I think is weird. People who know me find that very strange, but for some reason, I am. I don't mind being that guy - I have fun with it.”

“Because we live in such a mind-dominated culture, most modern art, architecture, music, and literature are devoid of beauty, of inner essence, with very few exceptions.”

“Jews have always controlled the business (...). The motion picture influence of the United States and Canada (...) is exclusively under the control, moral and financial, of the Jewish manipulators of the public mind.”

“The world is narrow, broad the mind—
Thoughts dwell easily side by side
Things collide violently in space”

“Looking back on the long period of post-war peace, reflecting on our past and bearing in mind the feelings of deep remorse, I earnestly hope that the ravages of war will never again be repeated.”

“When you think or speak about yourself, when you say, “I,” what you usually refer to is “me and my story.” This is the “I” of your likes and dislikes, fears and desires, the “I” that is never satisfied for long. It is a mind-made sense of who you are, conditioned by the past and seeking to find its fulfillment in the future.”

“How quick we are to form an opinion of a person, to come to a conclusion about them. It is satisfying to the egoic mind to label another human being, to give them a conceptual identity, to pronounce righteous judgment upon them.”

“We depend on nature not only for our physical survival. We also need nature to show us the way home, the way out of the prison of our own minds. We got lost in doing, thinking, remembering, anticipating–lost in a maze of complexity and a world of problems.”

“The mind is incessantly looking not only for food for thought; it is looking for food for its identity, its sense of self. This is how the ego comes into existence and continuously re-creates itself.”

“Die to everything of yesterday so that your mind is always fresh, always young, innocent, full of vigor and passion.”

“The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.”

“To let go of judgment does not mean that you don’t see what they do. It means that you recognize their behavior as a form of conditioning, and you see it and accept it as that. You don’t construct an identity out of it for that person.
That liberates you as well as the other person from identification with conditioning, with form, with mind. That liberates you as well as the other person from identification with conditioning, with form, with mind. The ego then no longer runs your relationships.”

“Every human being has been conditioned to think and behave in certain ways– conditioned genetically as well as by their childhood experiences and their cultural environment. That is not who they are, but that is who they appear to be. When you pronounce judgment upon someone, you confuse those conditioned mind patterns with who they are. To do that is in itself a deeply conditioned and unconscious pattern. You give them a conceptual identity, and that false identity becomes a prison not only for the other person but also for yourself.”

“All the misery on the planet arises due to a personalized sense of me or us. That covers up the essence of who you are. When you are unaware of that inner essence, in the end, you always create misery. It's as simple as that. When you don't know who you are, you create a mind-made self as a substitute for your beautiful, divine being and cling to that fearful and needy self. Protecting and enhancing that false sense of self then becomes your primary motivating force.”

“The Truth is far more all-encompassing than the mind could ever comprehend. No thought can encapsulate the Truth. At best, it can point to it. For example, it can say: “All things are intrinsically one.” That is a pointer, not an explanation. Understanding these words means feeling deep within you the truth to which they point.”

“Finding that dimension frees you and the world from the suffering you inflict on yourself and others when the mind-made “little me” is all you know and runs your life. Love, joy, creative expansion, and lasting inner peace cannot come into your life except through that unconditioned dimension of consciousness.”

“The human condition: Lost in thought Most people spend their entire life imprisoned within the confines of their own thoughts. They never go beyond a narrow, mind-made, personalized sense of self that is conditioned by the past. In you, as in each human being, there is a dimension of consciousness far deeper than thought. It is the very essence of who you are. We may call it presence, awareness, the unconditioned consciousness. In the ancient teachings, it is the Christ within, or your Buddha nature.”

“The greatest and noblest conceptions have no image wrought plainly for human vision, which he who wishes to satisfy the mind of the inquirer can apply to some one of his senses and by mere exhibition satisfy the mind. We must therefore endeavor by practice to acquire the power of giving and understanding a rational definition of each one of them; for immaterial things, which are the noblest and greatest, can be exhibited by reason only, and it is for their sake that all we are saying is said. But it is always easier to practice in small matters than in greater ones.”

“The very fact of our existence - a miracle arousing surprise of the great minds.”

“The complexity of the world is not revealed by its simplification in human mind.”

“I am an unpredjudiced and tolerant individual.

My mind
is like
a
whore's legs.”

“I never compare myself to others.
I never use my family's name to acquire anything.
I want people to like and look at what I have personally accomplished …on my own, and the person I am as a result.
I have always been the best in every field I have chosen.
I feel confident that I shall succeed beautifully in any endeavor I put my mind to.
I realize that this may sound conceited, but it is more a confidence.
However when I put my heart and soul into anything,
the positive outcomes yield overall
superlative results.”

“Do not squander your time,
self respect
nor
piece of mind
to shed light on someone else's true colors.
Lack of Character always reveals itself
in the end.
Trust vibes.
Energy does not lie!”

“So many people are most miserable these days.
The reason they find it so difficult to be happy is that they always view the past to be better than it was, the present dramatically worse than it is, and the future less resolute than it will be.
The idea of happiness is foreign to them.
Is this not something that is innate because babies are born with
"tabula rasa" which refers to the epistemological idea that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that therefore all knowledge comes from experience or perception. However I don't disagree with the doctrine of Innatism which holds that the mind is born already in possession of certain knowledge.
A smile, for instance is natural and innate!
So it is a combination of the two schools of thought.”

“He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

“Art is the objectification of feeling.
It is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.”

“Love is the answer and you know that for sure.
Love is a flower, you got to let it — you got to let it grow.”

“Sometimes I take all the shine
Talk like I drank all the wine
Years ahead but way behind
I'm on one, two, three, four, five
No half-truths, just naked minds
Caught between space and time
This not what they had in mind
But maybe someday...”

“Seem like the more fame, I only got wilder
Hands up, we just doing what the cops taught us
I've been outta my mind a long time
I've been outta my mind a long time
I be saying how I feel at the wrong time
Might not come when you want but I'm on time. Name one genius that ain't crazy.”

“I woke up early this morning with a new state of mind,
A creative way to rhyme without usin' knives and guns.
Keep your nose out the sky, keep your heart to God,
And keep your face to the rising sun. I feel like one day you'll understand me, dawg
You can still love your man and be manly, dawg”

“So keep on playing those mind games together
Doing the ritual dance in the sun...
Putting their soul power to the karmic wheel.”

“We all been playing those mind games forever
Some kinda druid dudes lifting the veil.
Doing the mind guerrilla,
Some call it magic — the search for the grail.”

“One, cannot envision when the mind is blind.”

“When our mind can no longer see that these are kids in front of us, we start calling them adults.”

“You can't live a positive life with a negative mind and if you have a positive outcome you have a positive income and just to have more positivity and just to kind of laugh it off.”

“All struggle becomes celebration, ultimately, in the mind of the Master, who understands that every circumstance and condition has been produced co-jointly, by all of the Souls collaboratively creating that experience or that event, in order that each of the Souls might have a perfect contextual field within which to announce and to declare, to express and to fulfill at the next level, Who They Really Are. This is about spiritual growth. This is about spiritual expansion. This is about the Soul’s evolution.”

“The heart is the bridge between the mind and the soul. First get out of your mind and into your heart space. From there it is a quick jump into your soul.”

“The heart is the bridge between the mind and the soul. First get out of your mind and into your heart space. From there it is a quick jump into your soul. When you are in your heart space with another, that is when you can have a real soul talk. When you are in your heart space with yourself, that is when you can experience connecting with your soul at a very deep level. That is when you can experience communion with God.”

“After you have gotten the mind, allowed the mind, to remove its focus from your story—tell it to refocus on what you—Big You—now choose to be. Once you get free of your story and your data, once you get to the space of no-thought, you then choose a state of being.”

“Always keep your mind open. In all things, always keep your mind open. Everything is possible. Especially things you know nothing about.”

“A positive mindset is not just a state of mind, it's a way of life.”

“It is fascinating the intellect of a person who always has a resource, who instead of getting down about a problem look for a solution. The mind remains the most interesting and engaging place of a human being.”

“Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts. Whenever your mind becomes scattered, use your breath as the means to take hold of your mind again.”