Quotes about mind
page 74

“Were the destiny of woman thus exactly marked out, did she invariably retain the shelter of a parent’s or guardian’s roof till she married, did marriage give her a sure home and a protector, were she never liable to be made a widow, or, if so, sure of finding immediate protection from a brother or new husband, so that she might never be forced to stand alone one moment, and were her mind given for this world only, with no faculties capable of eternal growth and infinite improvement, we would still demand of her a far wider and more generous culture than is proposed by those who so anxiously define her sphere.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Article, The New York Daily Tribune (30 September 1845); quoted in Brilliant Bylines (1986) by Barbara Belford.

Marriage, World, Home, Parent

““What about spatial relationships?” the investigator inquired, as I was looking at the books. It was difficult to answer. True, the perspective looked rather odd, and the walls of the room no longer seemed to meet in right angles. But these were not the really important facts. The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as Where?—How far?—How situated in relation to what? In the mescalin experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its Perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern. I saw the books, but was not at all concerned with their positions in space. What I noticed, what impressed itself upon my mind was the fact that all of them glowed with living light and that in some the glory was more manifest than in others. In this context position and the three dimensions were beside the point. Not, of course, that the category of space had been abolished. When I got up and walked about, I could do so quite normally, without misjudging the whereabouts of objects. Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

describing his experiment with mescaline, pp. 19-20
Source: The Doors of Perception (1954)

Books, World, Question, Problem

“Materialism is the recognition of "objects in themselves", or outside the mind; ideas and sensations are copies of images of those objects.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908)

Idea

“As coordination contains all the principles of organization, it likewise expresses all the purposes of organization, in so far as these purposes relate to its internal structure. To avoid confusion we must keep in mind that there are always two objectives of organization, the internal and the external. The latter may be anything, according to the purpose or interest that calls the group together, but the internal objective is coordinative always.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: Onward Industry!, 1931, p. 20

“You're not alone with your nervous feelings. Every single person who walks in that room is feeling the same way that you are. But you have an opportunity to view your nerves as something different. It has been proven that the physical effects of stress (meaning the jitters you get, the shortness of breath, the rapid heart rate) are identical to the physical effects of courage! So when you start to feel nervous and stressed, redefine it in your mind: You are getting courageous and ready for a challenge! Don't see it as a threat but rather an opportunity to show your courage!”

Shandi Finnessey (1978) American beauty queen, model, and television hostess

"5 Ways To Rock An Interview" http://www.pageantology.com/blog/2014/6/19/5-ways-to-rock-an-interview, Pageantology (July 7, 2014).

Way, Feeling, Courage, Heart

“The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires. The slightest observation, however, might satisfy him, that, in all the ordinary situations of human life, a well-disposed mind may be equally calm, equally cheerful, and equally contented. Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.”

Adam Smith book The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Chap. III.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part III

Life, Peace, Justice, Passion

“What I have to express is not handled with words. It must 'come' tot the observer. It must carry its influence over the mind of the individual into that region of him which is more than the mind. The pictures must reach inwards into the deeper experiences of the beholder – and mind you they care in no sense religious tracts – there is no story to them or literature – no morals – they are merely artistic expressions of mystical states – these in themselves being my own personal motives as drawn from either special experiences or aggregate ones.”

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) American artist

letter to Alfred Stieglitz, September 28, 1913, Hartley Archive, Yale University; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 9
1908 - 1920

Literature, Motivation, Sense, Personality

“Nothing is more narrow-minded than chauvinism or race hatred. To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for them all. No petty prejudices!”

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist

Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)

Men

“Nakata let his body relax, switched off his mind, allowing things to flow through him. This was natural for him, something he'd done ever since he was a child, without a second thought. Before long the borders of his consciousness fluttered around, just like the butterflies. Beyond these borders lay a dark abyss. Occasionally his consciousness would fly over the border and hover over that dizzying, black crevass. But Nakata wasn't afraid of the darkness or how deep it was. And why should he be? That bottomless world of darkness, that weighty silence and chaos, was an old friend, a part of him already. Nakata understood this well. In that world there was no writing, no days of the week, no scary Governor, no opera, no BMWs. No scissors, no tall hats. On the other hand, there was also no delicious eel, no tasty bean-jam buns. Everything is there, but there are no parts. Since there are no parts, there's no need to replace one thing with another. No need to remove anything, or add anything. You don't have to think about difficult things, just let yourself soak it all in. For Nakata, nothing could be better.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter Ten

World, Nature, Thinking, Silence

“His appearance gives no clue to what his profession might be, and yet he doesn't look like a man without a profession either. Consider what he's like: He always knows what to do. He knows how to gaze into a woman's eyes. He can put his mind to any question at any time. He can box. He is gifted, strong-willed, open-minded, fearless, tenacious, dashing, circumspect — why quibble, suppose we grant him all those qualities — yet he has none of them! They have made him what he is, they have set his course for him, and yet they don't belong to him. When he is angry, something in him laughs. When he is sad, he is up to something. When something moves him, he turns against it. He'll always see a good side to every bad action. What he thinks of anything will always depend on some possible context — nothing is, to him, what it is: everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a super-whole that, however, he knows nothing about. So every answer he gives is only a partial answer, every feeling an opinion, and he never cares what something is, only 'how' it is — some extraneous seasoning that somehow goes along with it, that's what interests him.”

Robert Musil book The Man Without Qualities

The Man Without Qualities (1930–1942)

Sadness, Feeling, Question, Thinking

“It is curious to observe what different ideals of happiness people cherish, and in what singular places they look for this well-spring of their life. Many look for it in the hoarding of riches, some in the pride of power, and others in the achievements of art and literature; a few seek it in the exploration of their own minds, or in search for knowledge.”

Helen Keller book Optimism

Optimism (1903)

Life, Happiness, People, Art

“Throughout theological history we have been assured by religious leaders that if we perform certain rituals, repeat certain prayers or mantras, conform to certain patterns, suppress our desires, control our thoughts, sublimate our passions, limit our appetites and refrain from sexual indulgence, we shall, after sufficient torture of the mind and body, find something beyond this little life. And that is what millions of so-called religious people have done through the ages, either in isolation, going off into the desert or into the mountains or a cave or wandering from village to village with a begging bowl, or, in a group, joining a monastery, forcing their minds to conform to an established pattern. But a tortured mind, a broken mind, a mind which wants to escape from all turmoil, which has denied the outer world and been made dull through discipline and conformity — such a mind, however long it seeks, will find only according to its own distortion.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

1960s, (1969)

Life, People, Age, World

“The danger of a closed mind is that it can also leave good things like love, compassion and reason on its outside.”

Lennox Lewis (1965) British-Canadian boxer

Lennox Lewis (From his Twitter account)

Love

“O ye who are invested with the Bayán! Regard not yourselves as being like unto the people to whom the Qur’án or the Gospel or other Scriptures of old were given, since at the time of His manifestation ye shall stray farther from God than did they. If ye happen to shut yourselves out it would never cross your minds that ye were shut out from Him. It behooveth you to consider how the people unto whom the Qur’án was given were debarred from the Truth, for indeed ye will act in a like manner, thinking that ye are doers of good. If ye perceive the degree of your deprivation of God, ye will wish to have perished from the face of the earth and to have sunk into oblivion. The day will come when ye will earnestly desire to know that which would meet with the good-pleasure of God but, alas, ye shall find no path unto Him. Ye, even as camels that wander aimlessly, will not find a pasture wherein ye may gather and unite upon a Cause in which ye can assuredly believe. At that time God shall cause the Sun of Truth to shine forth and the oceans of His bounty and grace to surge, while ye will have chosen droplets of water as the object of your desire, and will have deprived yourselves of the plenteous waters in His oceans.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

XVI, 13
The Kitáb-I-Asmá

God, People, Pleasure, Truth

“Government is humbug. There is no government. Behind the noisy, smoke-belching, larger-than-life illusion of government are ordinary human beings. It isn't accurate to say government 'is composed of' people; government is simply people. They may be good people but they are very bad wizards. Mortals have no magic. Individuals are the only human reality. All groups are fictions. That is, groups have no concrete existence; they are not beings or entities in themselves; they exist only in the abstract, in the mind. Governments, nations, societies, classes, tribes, cub scout packs, football teams, corporations, labor unions, proletariats, political parties, majorities, elite minorities, communities, civilizations and such are all fictions. Those words only describe, or try to describe, a relationship between persons.”

Roger Lea MacBride (1929–1995) American writer, TV producer, and politician; 1976 Libertarian Party candidate for President

A New Dawn for America : The Libertarian Challenge (1976) p. 16

Life, People, Communication, Reality

“A child that knows nothing of God’s earth, of green fields, or sparkling brooks, of breezy hill and springy heather, and whose mind is stored with none of the beauties of nature, but knows only the drunkenness prevalent in the hideous slum it is forced to live in, and whose walks abroad have never extended beyond the corner public-house and the pawnshop, cannot be benefited by education. Such children grow up to depraved, and become a danger and terror to the State; wealth-destroyers instead of wealth-producers.”

William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme (1851–1925) English industrialist, philanthropist, and politician

"Land for House," 1898

God, Children, Education, Beauty

“Out of the beliefs nourished by the agrarian myth there had arisen the notion that the city was a parasitical growth on the country. Bryan spoke for a people raised for generations on the idea that the farmer was a very special creature, blessed by God, and that in a country consisting largely of farmers the voice of the farmer was the voice of democracy and of virtue itself. The agrarian myth encouraged farmers to believe that they were not themselves an organic part of the whole order of business enterprise and speculation that flourished in the city, partaking of its character and sharing in its risks, but rather the innocent pastoral victims of a conspiracy hatched in the distance. The notion of an innocent and victimized populace colors the whole history of agrarian controversy, and indeed the whole history of the populistic mind.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R. (1955), Chapter I, part I, p. 35

God, People, Color, Democracy

“Sure you have made me passing glad
That you your mind so soon removed,
Before that I the leisure had
To choose you for my best beloved”

William Byrd (1543–1623) British composer

Poem: The Faithless Shepherdess http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-faithless-shepherdess/

“Increasingly I suspected that this race, in spite of all its triumphs, was now living on the great ideas of its past, mouthing concepts that it no longer had the sensibility to understand, paying verbal homage to ideals which it could no longer sincerely will, and behaving within a system of institutions many of which could only be worked successfully by minds of a slightly finer temper.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter III: The Other Earth; 3. The Prospects of the Race (p. 39)

Idea, Understanding, Past, Sincerity

“[T]he hallmarks of Lincoln's greatness were his ability to grow and his willingness to change his mind. During the war, he had come to embrace the Radical position on immediate emancipation and the enlistment of black soldiers. In 1864 he privately suggested to Governor Hahn that Louisiana allow some blacks to vote under its new constitution, singling out the educated, propertied free blacks of New Orleans and those who had served in the Union army. In April 1865, shortly before his death, Lincoln for the first time publicly stated his support for this kind of limited black suffrage.”

Eric Foner (1943) American historian

2000s, If Lincoln Hadn't Died (2009)

Death, War, Education, Support

“You can have a team of unconventional thinkers, as well as conventional thinkers. If you don't have the support of others you cannot achieve anything altogether on your own. It's like a cry in the wilderness. In each instance there were others who could see the same thing, and there were others who could not. It's an obvious difference we see in those who you might say have a bird's eye view, and those who have a worm's eye view. I've come to realize that we all have a different mind set, we all see things differently, and that's what the human condition is really all about.”

Jonas Salk (1914–1995) Inventor of polio vaccine

Academy of Achievement interview (1991)

Support, Bird, Cry

““I haven’t changed my mind, if that’s what you’re getting at,” he said at length. The stench and crackle of burning boats was vivid to him.”

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

continuity (3) “After One Decade”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

Change

“"I consider this Negro [Benjamin Banneker] as fresh proof that the powers of the mind are disconnected with the colour of the skin or in other words, a striking contradiction to Mr. Hume's doctrine that "the Negroes are naturally inferior to the whites and unsusceptible of attainments in arts and sciences.""”

James McHenry

https://archive.org/details/ERIC_ED069838
http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1215&context=theses
https://books.google.com/books?id=ny-UAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA116

Art, Nature, Science

“It's the way we are - our people show their respect to their leaders by keeping quiet. It is considered rude to speak your mind.”

Graeme Leung Fijian lawyer

24 May 2005 letter to Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase

People, Way

“The rigors of membership in the Progress Labor Party and its Stalinist tendencies only create a mental brick wall for the members of the sect. The Progress Labor Party and its vacuum-minded Communists should not be marked for government control merely because they are Communists. The illegal actions of PL do,…”

Phillip Abbott Luce (1935–1998)

Source: The New Left: The Resurgence of Radicalism Among American Students (1966), p. 103

“So, Kent Hovind gets out of prison and every atheist wants a piece of him. I understand that; I hate liars, I hate anyone who deceives even little old ladies and especially other people's children. So, of course I'd love to have the opportunity to get into it with Mister (not Doctor) Kent Hovind, as would every other atheist activist with a passion for science and a concern for truth. Understand though that this charlatan is every kind of fraud. He just wants to reestablish his racket. His schtick is to pretend to be more important than he is; we all know that his thesis was just as bogus as the PHD that he bought from a mail order catalog for about $100, he also claims to have taught high school science for about 15 years, hoping that folks will think that he has some verifiable connection to a high school somewhere (an actual school), but what I suspect is really the case is he may have preached to homeschooled kids at his house (which he used as a church sometimes). I can understand Atheist Podcast wanting to have this guy on to take him to task, but remember, he is a conman, a professional fraud. In his mind, he gains merit and financial supporters as a result of being "oppressed in the face of adversity", so go ahead and have him on, but only as a sideshow freak, someone to gawk at; show him the contempt he deserves. Don't treat him like an opponent, as if he had something to bring to the table.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Debating Dr Dunno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKw8K7o-vwY (August 4, 2015)

Love, Hate, Children, People

“And look at the finesse of these historians. They maintain that such facts and narratives must be swept under the carpet in the interest of national integration: recalling them will offend Muslims, they say, doing so will sow rancour against Muslims in the minds of Hindus, they say. Simultaneously, they insist on concocting the myth of Hindus destroying Buddhist temples. Will that concoction not distance Buddhists from Hindus? Will that narrative, specially when it does not have the slightest basis in fact, not embitter Hindus?”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

“Experience informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. II

“Religion can not be defined as belonging to any special faculty; and even reverence and worship are but local manifestations of the religious element, and can not be said to be true religion unless they extend through every department of the mind. Religion, properly considered, is that subtle agent of the soul which aspires to perfection in whatever way it is to be attained; and seeks to worship God because he is infinite, and is what man is for ever aspiring to become.”

Cora L. V. Scott (1840–1923) American spiritualist, writer

“The Religion of Life” (1858)

God, Religion, Way, Soul

“The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, 'This is jessamine, this violet, this rose'. But at last Dahoum drew me: 'Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all', and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. 'This,' they told me, 'is the best: it has no taste.”

T. E. Lawrence book Seven Pillars of Wisdom

My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.
Source: Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), Ch. 3

World, Dogs, Way, Flowers

“In Germany the common people are peace-loving, … The Devil has put his representative Hitler in control, a man who is of unsound mind, cruel, malicious and ruthless... He cruelly persecutes the Jews because they were once Jehovah’s covenant people and bore the name of Jehovah, and because Christ Jesus was a Jew.”

Joseph Franklin Rutherford (1869–1942) American judge

[The Evils of Nazism Exposed, Awake!, 1995]

Love, People, Peace, Christ

“We are all familiar with the passionate and closely argued appeal against censorship by the outstanding Soviet writer A. Solzhenitsyn. He as well as G. Vladimov, G. Svirsky, and other writers who have spoken out on the subject have clearly shown how incompetent censorship destroys the living soul of Soviet literature, but the same applies of course to all other manifestations of social thought, causing stagnation and dullness and preventing fresh and deep ideas.
Such ideas, after all, can arise only in discussion, in the face of objections, only if there is a potential possibility of expressing not only true but also dubious ideas. This was clear to the philosophers of ancient Greece and hardly anyone nowadays would have any doubts on that score. But after fifty years of complete domination over the minds of an entire nation, our leaders seem to fear even allusions to such a discussion.”

Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist

Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, The Threat to Intellectual Freedom

Fear, Soul, Literature, Idea

“Peter Sissons: The single currency, a United States of Europe, was all that in your mind when you took Britain in?
Edward Heath: Of course, yes.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

On BBC's Question Time (1 November 1990), quoted in Peter Sissons, When One Door Closes (Biteback, 2012).
Post-Prime Ministerial

“Only a year after the collapse of the Third Reich a strangely conclusive piece of evidence can be advanced to support the claim that "fanatical", this key National Socialist term, never really had the sting taken out of it by excessive use. For although scraps of the LTI surface all over the place in contemporary language, "fanatical" has disappeared. From this one can safely conclude that either consciously or subconsciously people remained aware of the real facts of the case all through those twelve years, namely, that a confused state of mind, equally close to sickness and criminality, was for twelve years [of Nazi rule] held to be the greatest virtue.”

Victor Klemperer book LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii

Source: LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii (The Language of the Third Reich) (1947), p. 61.

People, Support

“The duty to prosecute, or not to prosecute, is a social and not a legal duty, which depends on the circumstances of each case. It cannot be said that it is a moral duty to prosecute in all cases. The matter depends on considerations, which vary according to each case. But the person who has to act is bound morally to be influenced by no indirect motive. He is morally bound to bring a fair and honest mind to the consideration and to exercise his decision from a sense of duty to himself and others.”

Charles Bowen (1835–1894) English judge

Jones v. Merionethshire Permanent Benefit Building Society (1891), L. R. 1 C. D. [1892], p. 183.

Exercises, Motivation, Decision, Sense

“I was an apprentice to a linnen-draper when this king was born, and continued at the trade some years, but the shop being too narrow and short for my large mind, I took leave of my master, but said nothing. Then I lived a country-life for some years; and in the late wars I was a soldier, and sometimes had the honour and misfortune to lodg and dislodg an army. In the year 1G52, I entred upon iron works, and pli'd them several years, and in them times I made it my business to survey the three great rivers of England, and some small ones; and made two navigable, and a third almost compleated. I next studied the great weakness of the rye-lands, and the surfeit it was then under by reason of their long tillage. I did by practick and theorick find out the reason of its defection, as also of its recovery, and applyed the remedy in putting out two books, which were so fitted to the country-man's capacity, that he fell on pell-mell; and I hope, and partly know, that great part of Worcestershire, Glocestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, and Staffordshire, have doubled the value of the land by the husbandry discovered to them; see my two books printed by Mr Sawbridg on Ludgate Hill, entitled, Yarranton's Improvement ly Clover, and there thou mayest be further satisfied.* I also for many years served the countreys with the seed, and at last gave them the knowledg of getting it with ease and small trouble; and what I have been doing since, my book tells you at large.”

Andrew Yarranton (1619–1684) English civil engineer

Source: Quotes from England's Improvement, (1677), p. 193; cited in Patrick Edward Dove (1854, p. 405-6)

Life, War, Books, Hope

“[My mother] closed the school the next day [after a visit from Castro's soldiers], because she knew that the purpose of education was the broadening and opening of children's minds. And she couldn't be a party to the systematic closing of minds, borders, freedoms and ideals.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

address to LULAC (July 1, 2005)
2007, 2008

Children, Education, School, Freedom

“Codification and mechanisms do not sufficiently ensure the right to peace. What is crucial is to develop a true culture of peace. This requires education for peace. Everyone – not only children – should be educated in compromise, cooperation, empathy, solidarity, compassion, restoration and reconciliation. In short, we must learn respect for others and how to live in harmony, even if we agree to disagree. Negotiation and mediation skills must be taught so as to prevent breaches of the peace and other forms of violence. A philosophical paradigm change is necessary, so that we are not caught in the old mind-set, in the prevailing culture of violence, the logic of war, aggressive attitudes, practices of economic exploitation and cultural imperialism.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Statement by Alfred de Zayas, 20/2/2013 http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=13030&LangID=E. <br class="br">2013

War, Children, Education, Peace

“The power of attending to what is spoken, or in other words the power of listening, is one of the most useful habits that we can acquire; it keeps the mind active, and we can thus learn not only by hearing, but by reading and reflection, by fixing our minds steadily on the matter which we wish to master. It is… in a great degree, the sure means of success in all that we undertake; and if the power is not acquired early in life, great labour will be necessary to acquire it afterwards.”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

An Old Man's Thoughts on Many Things, Of Education I

Life, Learning, Reading, Success

“Those whose minds are jammed with prejudice have room for little else. Growth is dead. Learning is gridlocked. They may understand our logic, but logic makes no difference. The word root of prejudice, praejudicium, implies prejudgment. People are prejudiced both for and against a philosophy, a religion, a belief system. They are prejudiced for or against a political party, the make of an automobile, a race, a person — you name it.”

Gerry Spence (1929) American lawyer

Source: How to Argue and Win Every Time (1995), Ch. 6 : The Power of Prejudice : Examining the Garment, Bleaching the Stain, p. 74

People, Religion, Understanding, Learning

“This Bible, then, has a mission, grander than any mere creation of God; for in this volume are infinite wisdom, and infinite love. Between its covers are the mind and heart of God; and they are for man's good, for his salvation, his guidance, his spiritual nourishment. If now I neglect my Bible, I do my soul a wrong; for the fact of this Divine message is evidence that I need it.”

Abbott Eliot Kittredge (1834–1912) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 32.

Love, Wisdom, God, Soul

“We do not need French post-structuralism, whose pedantic jargon, clumsy convolutions, and prissy abstractions have spread throughout academe and the arts and are now blighting the most promising minds of the next generation. This is a major crisis if there ever was one, and every sensible person must help bring it to an end.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. ix

Art, Help, Personality

“The concept of ideographic writing is a most seductive notion. There is great appeal in the concept of written symbols conveying their message directly to our minds, thus bypassing the restrictive intermediary of speech. And it seems so plausible. Surely ideas immediately pop into our minds when we see a road sign, a death's head label on a bottle of medicine, a number on a clock. Aren't Chinese characters a sophisticated system of symbols that similarly convey meaning without regard to sound? Aren't they an ideographic system of writing? The answer to these questions is no. Chinese characters are a phonetic, not an ideographic, system of writing… Here I would go further: There never has been, and never can be, such a thing as an ideographic system of writing.”

John DeFrancis book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy

The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984, p. 133) http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html <br class="br">The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984)

Death, Idea, Question

““They say that they’re a punishment on godly people for allowing sin to walk the earth unanswered—”
“Who is this ‘they’ you’re always referring to?” Stanton glared at Rose, his eyes gleaming with unhidden malice. “Your mongoloid Aunt Kindy? Your drunken Uncle Sal? Or are you talking about the slack-jawed hacks who bang out those dime novels for a bottle of whiskey and the price of a flophouse?”
Rose stared at him, her mouth open in astonishment. But Stanton pressed on, his voice flat and awful.
“Or maybe you’re just using the word ‘they’ as so many pea-brained idiots use it, as a cowardly rhetorical device, an excuse to say the things you really believe without giving anyone the chance to judge you for the narrow-minded, stupid creature you are.””

M. K. Hobson book The Native Star

Source: The Native Star (2010), Chapter 15, “Ososolyeh” (pp. 211-212)

People, Stupidity, Chance

“But if these truths to which the declaration refers have not before been adopted in their combined entirety by national authority, it is a fact that they had been long pondered and often expressed in political speculation. It is generally assumed that French thought had some effect upon our public mind during Revolutionary days. This may have been true. But the principles of our declaration had been under discussion in the Colonies for nearly two generations before the advent of the French political philosophy that characterized the middle of the eighteenth century. In fact, they come from an earlier date. A very positive echo of what the Dutch had done in 1581, and what the English were preparing to do, appears in the assertion of the Reverend Thomas Hooker of Connecticut as early as 1638, when he said in a sermon before the General Court that 'The foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

'The choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God's own allowance'.
1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)

God, People, Truth, Appearance

“The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a universal Mind… To put the conclusion crudely — the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. As is often the way with crude statements, I shall have to explain that by "mind" I do not exactly mean mind and by "stuff" I do not at all mean stuff. Still that is about as near as we can get to the idea in a simple phrase. The mind-stuff of the world is something more general than our individual conscious minds; but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to feelings in our consciousness… Having granted this, the mental activity of the part of world constituting ourselves occasions no great surprise; it is known to us by direct self-knowledge, and we do not explain it away as something other than we know it to be — or rather, it knows itself to be.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Source: The Nature of the Physical World (1928), Ch. 13 Reality

World, Way, Feeling, Idea

“It must ever be borne in mind that the prime object of all fine arts is to please through some or other of the emotions which it stirs.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Part II : Practical Pictorial Photography, Fidelity to nature and justifiable untruth, p.3

Art

“Plough not the seas, sow not the sands,
Leave off your idle pain;
Seek other mistress for your minds,
Love's service is in vain.”

Robert Southwell (1561–1595) English Jesuit

"Love's Servile Lot", line 73; p. 65.

Love, Pain, Sea

“Then there is the Progressive Conservative party, the PC party, which won only 20 seats. Now, the term Progressive Conservative will immediately raise suspicions in all of your minds. It should. It's obviously kind of an oxymoron.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

1990s, Speech to the Council for National Policy (1997)

“What comes to mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”

Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897–1963) American missionary

The Knowledge of the Holy (1978)

God, Thinking

“Comics they say are not literature – adventure strips lack artistic form, mental substance, and emotional appeal to any but the most moronic of minds. Can it be that 100,000,000 Americans are morons?”

William Moulton Marston (1893–1947) American psychologist, lawyer, inventor and comic book writer

Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics. p. 35-44.

Literature

“I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Source: Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter XV-IXX, Chapter XV.

Freedom, Country

“Consider the case of a person who holds a view with probability 1. Then coherence says that it is no use having a debate with them because nothing will change their mind.”

Dennis Lindley (1923–2013) British statistician

6. Bayes Rule. p. 91.
Understanding Uncertainty (2006)

Change, Personality

“To be a student of Stuck [1898 - 1900] sounded good. In reality, however, it was not half so splendid. Instead of coming to him with a sound mind I brought a thousand pains and many prejudices. In the realm of colour I found it hard to progress. Since the tone provided by mood predominated strongly in my mastery of form, I sought to find as much profit as possible here at least. And, in this respect, a great deal really was to be gained at Stuck's. Naturally I was not the only one, at this time, to be deficient in the realm of color. Later, in his monograph, Kandinsky passed a similar judgement on this school [of Stuck].”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (1900), # 121, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1895 - 1902

Pain, School, Color, Mood

“This type of paradox is quite characteristic of Zen. It is an attempt to "break the mind of logic."”

Douglas Hofstadter book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

This statement refers to a koan
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (1979)

“But to pass on: Some have propounded the inquiry whether it is practicable for us to go on with the confederacy without further accessions? Have we the means and ability to maintain nationality among the powers of the earth? On this point I would barely say, that as anxiously as we all have been, and are, for the border States, with institutions similar to ours, to join us, still we are abundantly able to maintain our position, even if they should ultimately make up their minds not to cast their destiny with us. That they ultimately will join us be compelled to do it is my confident belief; but we can get on very well without them, even if they should not.”

Alexander H. Stephens (1812–1883) Vice President of the Confederate States (in office from 1861 to 1865)

The Cornerstone Speech (1861)

Confidence

“Is there any doubt that drug addiction is an escape from an unbearable inner state - from a reality that one cannot deal with - from an atrophying mind one can never fully destroy? If Apollonian reason were unnatural to man, and Dionysian intuition brought him closer to nature and truth, the apostles of irrationality would not have to resort to drugs. Happy, self-confident men do not seek to get stoned. Drug addiction is the attempt to obliterate one's consciousness, the quest for a deliberately-induced insanity. As such, it is so obscene and evil that any doubt about the moral character of its practitioners is itself an obscenity.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Apollo and Dionysus (1969)

Men, Happiness, Truth, Confidence

“It is to my mind much to be regretted, and it is a regret which I believe every Judge on the bench shares, that text-books are more and more quoted in Court—I mean, of course, text-books by living authors—and some Judges have gone so far as to say that they shall not be quoted.”

Arthur Kekewich (1832–1907) British judge

Union Bank v. Munster (1887), L. R. 37 CD. 54.

Books, Quotes

“Having made an utter failure of my life, I found myself one day, in the midst of my poverty and wretchedness, thinking about the female companions of my youth. As I went over them one by one, examining and comparing them in my mind's eye, it suddenly came over me that those slips of girls – which is all they were then – were in every way, both morally and intellectually, superior to the 'grave and mustachioed signior' I am now supposed to have become. The realization brought with it an overpowering sense of shame and remorse, and for a while I was plunged in the deepest despair. There and then I resolved to make a record of all the recollections of those days I could muster – those golden days when I dressed in silk and ate delicately, when we still nestled in the protecting shadow of the Ancestors and Heaven still smiled on us. I resolved to tell the world how, in defiance of all my family's attempts to bring me up properly and all the warnings and advice of my friends, I had brought myself to this present wretched state, in which, having frittered away half a lifetime, I find myself without a single skill with which I could earn a decent living. I resolved that, however unsightly my own shortcomings might be, I must not, for the sake of keeping them hid, allow those wonderful girls to pass into oblivion without a memorial.”

Cao Xueqin (1724–1763) Chinese writer during the Qing dynasty

Cao Xueqin, as quoted in the introduction attributed to his younger brother (Cao Tangcun) to the first chapter of Dream of the Red Chamber, present in the jiaxu (1754) version (the earliest-known manuscript copy of the novel), translated by David Hawkes in The Story of the Stone: The Golden Days (Penguin, 1973), pp. 20–21

Life, Youth, World, Family

“I've learned so much from being a mom about the kind of person I want to be, the kind of woman I want to be. Motherhood has taught me mindfulness. If you just parent on instinct, you'll screw your kid up for life. You have to be so mindful.”

Gwyneth Paltrow (1972) American actress, singer, and food writer

Interview with Gwyneth Paltrow, Good Housekeeping http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/family/celebrity-interviews/gwyneth-paltrow-interview-country-strong (2010)

Life, Moms, Parent, Learning

“At one time, I was an actor in the conduct of foreign policy. I became convinced that I was accomplishing nothing in that capacity, that the problems were deeper, that the answer lay in a direct approach to the public and in an effort to explain to the public what it was really about. Today, even that seems futile. Myths and errors are being established in the public mind more rapidly than they can be broken down. The mass media are too much for us. There is nothing that can be done about it. To correct this, you would have to educate the educators. I must say that I have lost all confidence in the freedom of the mass media. The fact of the matter is that in this country McCarthyism has already won, in the sense of making impossible the conduct of an intelligent foreign policy.”

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) American advisor, diplomat, political scientist and historian

April 17, 1951
The Kennan Diaries

Education, Error, Confidence, Intelligence

“Capitalism—at least as Sanders & Co. understand it—is not fulfilling. It doesn’t provide a sense of meaning and solidarity. It rewards—in their minds—the few and punishes the many. There must be a better, more humane way, in which we’re all in it together and sacrifice is shared. The word “social” comes from the Latin socii, meaning allies. People want to feel that they are allied with one another, fighting toward a common goal together for the good of the tribe, marching to the same drumbeats. This is innate in us. Our tribal brains crave social solidarity every bit as much as our palates crave foods that are sweet, fatty, or salty. We can train ourselves to resist the cravings or channel them toward productive ends. But very few of us can eliminate the craving itself.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2018, Socialism is So Hot Right Now (2018)

People, Food, Way, Feeling

“Let me end this chapter by suggesting that religion has done something for science. The latter came to full flower in its modern form in seventeenth-century Europe. Have you ever wondered why that's so? After all the ancient Greeks were pretty clever and the Chinese achieved a sophisticated culture well before we Europeans did, yet they did not hit on science as we now understand it. Quite a lot of people have thought that the missing ingredient was provided by the Christian religion. Of course, it's impossible to prove that so - we can't rerun history without Christianity and see what happens - but there's a respectable case worth considering. It runs like this.
The way Christians think about creation (and the same is true for Jews and Muslims) has four significant consequences. The first is that we expect the world to be orderly because its Creator is rational and consistent, yet God is also free to create a universe whichever way God chooses. Therefore, we can't figure it out just by thinking what the order of nature ought to be; we'll have to take a look and see. In other words, observation and experiment are indispensable. That's the bit the Greeks missed. They thought you could do it all just by cogitating. Third, because the world is God's creation, it's worthy of study. That, perhaps, was a point that the Chinese missed as they concentrated their attention on the world of humanity at the expense of the world of nature. Fourth, because the creation is not itself divine, we can prod it and investigate it without impiety. Put all these features together, and you have the intellectual setting in which science can get going.
It's certainly a historical fact that most of the pioneers of modern science were religious men. They may have had their difficulties with the Church (like Galileo) or been of an orthodox cast of mind (like Newton), but religion was important for them. They used to like to say that God had written two books for our instruction, the book of scripture and the book of nature. I think we need to try to decipher both books if we're to understand what's really happening.”

John Polkinghorne (1930) physicist and priest

page 29-30.
Quarks, Chaos & Christianity (1995)

Men, God, People, Books

“There were many reasons why we did not gain complete success at Arnhem. The following in my view were the main ones. First. The operation was not regarded at Supreme Headquarters as the spearhead of a major Allied movement on the northern flank designed to isolate, and finally to occupy, the Ruhr - the one objective in the West which the Germans could not afford to lose. There is no doubt in my mind that Eisenhower always wanted to give priority to the northern thrust and to scale down the southern one. He ordered this to be done, and he thought that it was being done. It was not being done. Second. The airborne forces at Arnhem were dropped too far away from the vital objective - the bridge. It was some hours before they reached it. I take the blame for this mistake. I should have ordered Second Army and 1st Airborne Corps to arrange that at least one complete Parachute Brigade was dropped quite close to the bridge, so that it could have been captured in a matter of minutes and its defence soundly organised with time to spare. I did not do so. Third. The weather. This turned against us after the first day and we could not carry out much of the later airborne programme. But weather is always an uncertain factor, in war and in peace. This uncertainty we all accepted. It could only have been offset, and the operation made a certainty, by allotting additional resources to the project, so that it became an Allied and not merely a British project. Fourth. The 2nd S. S. Panzer Corps was refitting in the Arnhem area, having limped up there after its mauling in Normandy. We knew it was there. But we were wrong in supposing that it could not fight effectively; its battle state was far beyond our expectation. It was quickly brought into action against the 1st Airborne Division.”

Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein (1887–1976) British Army officer, Commander of Allied forces at the Battle of El Alamein

Concerning Operation Market Garden in his autobiography, 'The Memoirs of Field Marshal Montgomery' (1958)

War, Peace, Time, Success

“In selecting our subject…there are two factors which it should be borne in mind are essential, and these are Expression and Composition”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Methods - The practical application of means to end, p. 16

“In theoretical science, the question is—What are we to think? and when a doubtful point arises, for the solution of which either experimental data are wanting, or mathematical methods are not sufficiently advanced, it is the duty of philosophic minds not to dispute about the probability of conflicting suppositions, but to labour for the advancement of experimental inquiry and of mathematics, and await patiently the time when they shall be adequate to solve the question.”

William John Macquorn Rankine (1820–1872) civil engineer

p, 125
"On the Harmony of Theory and Practice in Mechanics" (Jan. 3, 1856)

Mathematics, Question, Thinking, Science

“…that Chancellor of the Exchequer is the very man who comes down to corrupt whatever there is of financial virtue in us, and to instil into our minds those seductive and poisonous ideas that it does not, after all, matter very much if there is a deficit, and that it is extremely disagreeable when commerce is not in the most flourishing state to call upon the people to pay. Was that the practice of Sir Robert Peel? … he came to Parliament and stood at his place in the House of Commons, pointed out the figures as they stood, and said to them—I ask you, will you resort to the "miserable expedient" of tolerating deficit, and of making provision by loans from year to year? That which he denounced as the "miserable expedient" has become the standing law, has become almost the financial gospel of the Government that is now in power.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Edinburgh (29 November 1879), quoted in W. E. Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches 1879 (Leicester University Press, 1971), p. 152.
1870s

People, Law, Idea, Housing

“As far as Bach is concerned, I never came close to liking him [-] My favourite composer is Scriabin -[and] his Fifth sonata, in my mind, the greatest piece of music ever written.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Reflections (1981)

Music

“All in all he had not done badly out of the war, but the smells of it, the sights of it, and the cries of pain that attended it like the vultures, had sickened and soured him. Yes, he could fight well enough. And kill efficiently. He feared death, like other men, but could put that from his mind in battle, and he was no fool with a sword or knife. But several smoking ruins ago there had come a curious shift inside himself. He had lost his sense of purpose in the war; he supposed because it was not truly his own purpose but that of the King.”

Tanith Lee (1947–2015) British writer

Source: Short fiction, Companions on the Road (1975), Chapter 1, “Avillis” (p. 4)

Death, Men, Pain, War

“My parents seem to me possessed of great dignity. An aristocratic reserve. Like the very rich who live behind tall walls, my mother and father are always mindful of the line separating public from private life. Watching a celebrity talk show on television, they listen for several minutes as a movie star with bright teeth recounts details of his recent divorce. And I see my parents grow impatient. Finally, my mother gets up from her chair. Changing the channel, she says with simple disdain, ‘Cheap people.’ My mother and my father are not cheap people. They never are tempted to believe that public life can also be intimate. And I realize that my parents will be as puzzled by my act of self-revelation as they are by the movie star’s revelations on the talk show. They never will call me cheap for publishing an autobiography. But I can well imagine their faces tightened by incomprehension as they read my words.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Why does he do this?
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Life, People, Imagination, Star

“Fame's but a hollow echo; gold, pure clay;
Honour, the darling but of one short day,
Beauty—th' eye's idol—but a damasked skin;
State, but a golden prison to live in
And torture free-born minds.”

Walter Raleigh (1554–1618) English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer

"A Farewell to the Vanities of the World" http://www.bartleby.com/331/467.html, lines 3–7. Author uncertain. Attributed to Henry Wotton and to Raleigh. <br class="br">Attributed

Beauty

“A religious spirit animates the infancy of our literature, and must continue to gloe in its maturity. The public taste calls for this quality, and would relish no work in which it might be supplanted by a principle of infidelity. Our best authors have written under the influence of Christian feeling; but had they been destitute of this sentiment, they would have found it necessary to accommodate themselves to the opinions of the people, and follow Christian precedents. The beneficent influence of religion on literature, is like that of our evening sun, when it awakens in the clouds those beautiful and burning tints, which clothe the firmament in gold and purple. It constitutes the heart of learning - the great source of its moral power. Religion addresses itself to the highest and holiest of our sentiments - benevolence and veneration, and their excitement stirs up the imagination, strengthens the undeerstanding, and purifies the taste. Thus, both in the mind of the author and the reader, Christianity and literature act and react on each other, with the effect of elevating both, and carrying the human character to the highest perfection which it is destined to reach. Learning should be proud of this companionship, and exert all her wisdom to render it perpetual.”

Daniel Drake (1785–1852) American physician and writer

Daniel Drake (1834). Discourse on the History, Character, and Prospects of the West: Delivered to the Union Literary Society of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, at Their Ninth Anniversary, September 23, 1834. Truman and Smith. p. 31

Wisdom, People, Religion, Beauty

“In her book, Philosophy in a New Key, Susanne Langer remarks that certain ideas burst upon the intellectual landscape with a tremendous force. They resolve so many fundamental problems at once that they seem also to promise that they will resolve all fundamental problems, clarify all obscure issues. Everyone snaps them up as the open sesame of some new positive science, the conceptual center-point around which a comprehensive system of analysis can be built. The sudden vogue of such a grande ideé, crowding out almost everything else for a while, is due, she says, “to the fact that all sensitive and active minds turn at once to exploiting it. We try it in every connection, for every purpose, experiment with possible stretches of its strict meaning, with generalizations and derivatives.””

Clifford Geertz book The Interpretation of Cultures

Source: The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), p. 3

Books, Idea, Problem, Science

“Then re-united to the friends with whom vve took sweet counsel upon earth, we shall recount our toil, only to heighten our ecstasy; and call to mind the toil and the din of war, oniy that, with a more bounding throb and a richer song, we may fee! and celebrate the wonders of redemption.”

Henry Melvill (1798–1871) British academic

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 305.

War

“Nature has a million answers. Even as I observe tree trunks, roots, branches, idling in some corner, to be burnt down as wood, it affords an excellent laboratory to the mind. It is exciting, sensuous and intoxicating. If one submits oneself to the form and the raw energy of the tree even when it can no longer bear fruit and leaves, one can see great poetry and lyricism in its intertwining branches and roots. The functional sculptures and paintings are a result of this experiment. The process takes over thereafter, but it is just an ode to nature's beauty.”

Manav Gupta (1967) Indian artist

As quoted in "Indian Design and Interiors" IDI Magazine (October 2006)
2000s

Beauty, Nature, Tree, Painting

“When a lady chooses to change her mind, a gentleman would consider it no more than her privilege, and not badger her about it. (The Land of Green Ginger, 1937)”

Noel Langley (1911–1980) South African writer

Quote from: 1001 quotations to inspire you before you die; Quintessence Editions Ltd., 2016, ISBN 978-1-84403-895-4

Change

“Alchian: Two things you [Hayek] wrote that had a personal influence on me, after your Prices and Production, were 'Individualism and Economic Order' [sic — Alchian certainly has in mind Hayek's 'Economics and Knowledge'] and 'The Use of Knowledge in Society.' These I would regard as your two best articles, best in terms of their influence on me.
Hayek: 'Economics and Knowledge' — the '37 one — which is reprinted in the volume, is the one which marks the new look at things in my way.
Alchian: It was new to you, too, then? Was it a change in your own thinking?
Hayek: Yes, it was really the beginning of my looking at things in a new light. … I was aware that I was putting down things which were fairly well known in a new form, and perhaps it was the most exciting moment in my career when I saw it [i. e. 'Economics and Knowledge'] in print.
Alchian: Well, I'm delighted to hear you say that, because I had that copy typed up to mimeograph for my students in the first course I gave here [i. e. UCLA]. And Allan Wallace … came through town one day, and I said, 'Allan, I've got a great article!" He looked at it, started to laugh, and said, "I've seen it too; it's just phenomenal!' I'm just delighted to hear you say that it was exciting, because it was to me, too … that was a very influential article, I must say.”

Armen Alchian (1914–2013) American economist

Interviewing Friedrich Hayek, 1978

Way, Knowledge, Thinking, Light

“We should forever keep in mind that we must not brood on the wickedness of man, but realize that he is God’s image bearer.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Page 38.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

God

“The actual infinite arises in three contexts: first when it is realized in the most complete form, in a fully independent otherworldly being, in Deo, where I call it the Absolute Infinite or simply Absolute; second when it occurs in the contingent, created world; third when the mind grasps it in abstracto as a mathematical magnitude, number or order type.”

Georg Cantor (1845–1918) mathematician, inventor of set theory

As quoted in Mind Tools: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality (1988) by Rudy Rucker. ~ ISBN 0395468108

World, Mathematics

“To cease from evil, to do good, and to purify the mind yourself, this is the teaching of all the Buddhas.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

Source: Pali Canon, Sutta Pitaka, Khuddaka Nikaya (Minor Collection), Dhammapada, Ch. 14, Verse 183

Evil

“I recognised that I was (and I confessed) in that attitude of the mind wherein men admit mortality; something had already passed from me—I mean that fresh and vigorous morning of the eyes wherein the beauty of this land had been reflected as in a tiny mirror of burnished silver. Youth was gone out apart; it was loved and regretted, and therefore no longer possessed.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Source: The Four Men: A Farrago (1911), p. 159

Love, Men, Youth, Beauty

“Such reasoning [that God cannot be falsified] is absurd. Why would anyone try to prove that God doesn't exist when it can be proven that He does? Creation proves scientifically and absolutely to any sane mind that there is a Creator. His existence is axiomatic.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

God doesn't believe in atheists (2002)

God

“Think of all our knowledge-generating processes, our whole culture and civilization, and all the thought processes in the minds of every individual, and indeed the entire evolving biosphere as well, as being a gigantic computation. The whole thing is executing a self-motivated, self-generating computer program. More specifically it is, as I have mentioned, a virtual-reality program in the process of rendering, with ever-increasing accuracy, the whole of existence.”

David Deutsch book The Fabric of Reality

The Fabric of Reality (1997)

Motivation, Knowledge, Thinking, Reality

“By MANNERS, I mean not here Decency of behaviour; as how one man should salute another, or how a man should wash his mouth, or pick his teeth before company, and such other points of the Small Morals; But those qualities of mankind that concern their living together in Peace and Unity. To which end we are to consider that the Felicity of this life consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such Finis ultimus (utmost aim) nor Summum Bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old Moral Philosophers. Nor can a man any more live whose desires are at an end than he whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The First Part, Chapter 11, p. 47
Leviathan (1651)

Life, Books, Peace, Imagination

“Rationality requires a choice among all possible alternative behaviors. In actual behavior, only a very few of all these possible alternatives come to mind.”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

Source: 1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947, p. 79; As cited in: Terry Winograd, ‎Fernando Flores (1986) Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. p. 21.

Behavior

“Transcendental meditation is something that can be defined as a means to do what one wants to do in a better way, in a right way, for maximum results. It's a program that the mind begins to experience its own finer impressions, finer thoughts, and then finally transcends the finest thought. And that is the level of what they call self-referral pure consciousness, which is the ultimate reality of life, pure intelligence from where the creation emerges, from where the administration of life is maintained, from where physical expression of the universe has its basis.
Quoted from: w:Larry King Weekend, Interview With Maharishi Mahesh Yogi”

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1917–2008) Inventor of Transcendental Meditation, musician

2002-05-12
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0205/12/lklw.00.html

Life, Way, Intelligence, Reality

“Which mindset is right? Mine, of course. People who disagree with me are by definition crazy. (Until I change my mind, when they can suddenly become upstanding citizens. I'm flexible, and not black-and-white.)”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

2000s, 2005

People, Change

“After being murdered at Stalin's orders, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, alias Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), lived on for decades as the unassailable hero of aesthetically minded progressives who wished to persuade themselves that there could be a vegetarian version of communism.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Leon Trotsky', p. 747
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

Communication

“For one who sees the distinction, there is no further confusing of the mind with the self.”

Patañjali (-200–-150 BC) ancient Indian scholar(s) of grammar and linguistics, of yoga, of medical treatises

§ 4.25
Yoga Sutras of Patañjali

“I am bound to say that it took me a long time to understand what he meant. He began by saying that everybody thought of Space as an 'empty homogeneous medium.' 'Never mind at present what the ultimate constituents of that medium are. We take it as a finished product, and we think of it as mere extension, something without any quality at all. That is the view of civilised man. You will find all the philosophers taking it for granted. Yes, but every living thing does not take that view.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Space (1912)

Understanding, Thinking, Time

“Now he saw the problem with great clarity. If he lived here, life would be pleasant and safe. But it would also be predictable. A child could be born here, grow up here, die here, without ever experiencing the excitement of discovery. Why did Dona question him endlessly about his life in the burrow and his journey to the country of the ants? Because for her, it represented a world that was dangerous and full of fascinating possibilities. For the children of this underground city, life was a matter of repetition, of habit. And this, he suddenly realized, was the heart of the problem. Habit. Habit was a stifling, warm blanket that threatened you with suffocation and lulled the mind into a state of perpetual nagging dissatisfaction. Habit meant the inability to escape from yourself, to change and develop…”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Spider World: The Desert (1987), pp. 132-133

Life, Children, World, Question

“Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.”

Charlotte Brontë book Jane Eyre

Jane (Ch. 12)
Jane Eyre (1847)

Women, Men, Sex, Feeling

“Keeping other people’s flaws in mind is like keeping a bowl of foul-smelling food they have given you; it contaminates your heart, leaving no room for positive thoughts.”

Jun Hong Lu (1959) Australian Buddhist leader

Quotes from Words of Wisdoms Vol.2

People, Food, Heart

“Neither in any if the stars, nor in the sun, nor in the planets that are most operant in the world, can organs be disntinguished or imagined by us; nevertheless, they live and endow with life small bodies at the earth's elevated points. If there is aught of which man may boast, that of a surety is soul, is mind; and the other animals, too, are ennobled by soul; even God, by whose rod all things are governed, is soul.”

William Gilbert (astronomer) book De Magnete

As quoted in Gilbert, William. 2013 ed. De Magnete https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=QsLDAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false. Courier Corporation, pp. 130-131. <br class="br">De Magnete (1600)

Life, God, World, Soul

“Did you know that you use less than 1% of your brain? The good news is that mind mapping can help you to access the other 99%!”

Tony Buzan (1942–2019) British psychologist

The Mind Map Book, Buzan and Buzan (1991)

Help

“The event took place in the month of February of 1969, to the north of Boston, in Cambridge. I didn't write it down right away because my first intention was to forget it, so as not to lose my mind.”

Jorge Luis Borges book The Other

El hecho ocurrió en el mes de febrero de 1969, al norte de Boston, en Cambridge. No lo escribí inmediatamente porque mi primer propósito fue olvidarlo, para no perder la razón.
"The Other" ["El Otro"], The Book of Sand (1975)

Forgetting