Mind Quotes
Most popular mind quotes
If the [Zen] practitioner knows his own mind clearly, he will obtain results with little effort. But if he does not know anything about his own mind, all of his effort will be wasted.
Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.
So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger.
To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.
The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven.
The mind contains all possibilities.
It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.
Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
Cultivation to the mind is as necessary as food to the body.
Just as the mute person has trouble describing the taste of sugar, we have trouble describing the nature of mind.
The mind's direction is more important than its progress.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
It is wrong to think that misfortunes come from the east or from the west; they originate within one's own mind. Therefore, it is foolish to guard against misfortunes from the external world and leave the inner mind uncontrolled.
Just as a picture is drawn by an artist, surroundings are created by the activities of the mind.
If a man's mind becomes pure, his surroundings will also become pure.
Civilization no longer needs to open up wilderness; it needs wilderness to open up the still largely unexplored human mind.
The mind is everything. What you think you become.
Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
The truth is, a great mind must be androgynous.
A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.
The mind, of course, is just what the brain does for a living.
If any part of your uncertainty is a conflict between your heart and your mind—follow your mind.
There comes a point where the mind takes a leap—call it intuition or what you will—and comes out upon a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap.
It seems, indeed, a necessary weakness of our mind to be able to reach truth only across a multitude of errors and obstacles.
Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.
Your minds are endowed with a vast number of gifts of totally different uses—limbs of mind as it were, which, if you don't exercise, you cripple.
Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.
Every mind was made for growth, for knowledge; and its nature is sinned against when it is doomed to ignorance.
The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.
There is no monster more destructive than the inventive mind that has outstripped philosophy.
A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.
My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.
Whatever most captures your mind controls your life.
A man is known by the company his mind keeps.
What a surprise to find you could shift the contents of your head like rearranging furniture in a room.
By words the mind is winged.
It turns out that once your mind is expanded it is very hard to shrink it back down again.
The thing I call "my mind" seems to be kind of like a landlord that doesn't really know its tenants.
The most potent weapon in the in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.
Measure your mind's height by the shade it casts.
A mind once cultivated will not lie fallow for half an hour.
The march of the human mind is slow.
He thought that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the mind. Whereas I am incurable convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.
The mind is an iceberg—it floats with only one-seventh of its bulk above water.
An open mind, to be sure, should be open at both ends, like the food pipe, and have a capacity for excretion as well as intake.
The mind is not, I know, a highway, but a temple, and its doors should not be carelessly left open.
Wit is the lightning of the mind, reason the sunshine, and reflection the moonlight.
We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind.
There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.
Some minds improve by travel—others, Rather, resemble copper wire or brass, Which gets the narrower by going farther!
The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.
The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
A mind, like a home, is furnished by its owner, so if one's life is cold and bare he can blame none but himself. You have a chance to select from some pretty elegant furnishings.
A sword is never enough. The mind is also a weapon, but like the sword it must be honed and kept sharp.
Money can be lost or stolen, health and strength may fail, but what you have committed to your mind is yours forever.
In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.
The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts, and dwell a hermit anywhere.
A man's mind is known by the company it keeps.
The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
That's the classical mind at work, runs fine inside but looks dingy on the surface.
Is there no way out of the mind?
The mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth.
Walks. The body advances, while the mind flutters around it like a bird.
The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter.
The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways, but without materials from the external world it is powerless.
Mind does dominate body. We are superior to the house in which we dwell.
'Tis the mind that makes the body rich.
My mind is like a rowboat out on the stormy sea, He's with me right now, in the morning, where will he be?
A strong mind sees things in their true proportions; a weak one views them through a magnifying medium; which, like the microscope, makes an elephant of a flea; magnifies all little objects, but cannot receive great ones.
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
Untilled soil, however fertile it may be, will bear thistles and thorns; and so it is with man's mind.
A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince. Genius is not a retainer to any emperor.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our one duty is to furnish it well.
When people will not weed their own minds, they are apt to be overrun with nettles.
The mind is like a car battery—it recharges by running.
The mind can also be an erogenous zone.
The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.
Mind at the End of Its Tether.
Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.
Strongest minds Are often those of whom the noisy world Hears least.
The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to truth.
Stop allowing your mind to be a slave, to be jerked about by selfish impulses, to kick against fate and the present, and to mistrust the future.
All wrongdoing arises because of mind. If mind is transformed can wrongdoing remain?
In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true.
It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.
One's mind has a way of making itself up in the background, and it suddenly becomes clear what one means to do.
Who speaks of liberty while the human mind is in chains?
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.
The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity ...The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.
The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.
You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
Never make your home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You'll find what you need to furnish it—memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey.
