Mind Quotes

“The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows”
― Stephen King

“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“The mind has a powerful way of attracting things that are in harmony with it, good and bad.”
― Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability

“What's the point in having a mind if you don't use it to make judgements?”
― Sarah J. Maas, Throne of Glass

“The things you think about determine the quality of your mind.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“BEFRIENDING THE BODY

Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard. Angry people live in angry bodies. The bodies of child-abuse victims are tense and defensive until they find a way to relax and feel safe. In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.

In my practice I begin the process by helping my patients to first notice and then describe the feelings in their bodies—not emotions such as anger or anxiety or fear but the physical sensations beneath the emotions: pressure, heat, muscular tension, tingling, caving in, feeling hollow, and so on. I also work on identifying the sensations associated with relaxation or pleasure. I help them become aware of their breath, their gestures and movements.

All too often, however, drugs such as Abilify, Zyprexa, and Seroquel, are prescribed instead of teaching people the skills to deal with such distressing physical reactions. Of course, medications only blunt sensations and do nothing to resolve them or transform them from toxic agents into allies.

The mind needs to be reeducated to feel physical sensations, and the body needs to be helped to tolerate and enjoy the comforts of touch. Individuals who lack emotional awareness are able, with practice, to connect their physical sensations to psychological events. Then they can slowly reconnect with themselves.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“You must read, you must persevere, you must sit up nights, you must inquire, and exert the utmost power of your mind. If one way does not lead to the desired meaning, take another; if obstacles arise, then still another; until, if your strength holds out, you will find that clear which at first looked dark.”
― Giovanni Boccaccio

“Where to look if you've lost your mind?”
― Bernard Malamud, The Fixer

“Ignorance is hardly unusual, Miss Davar. The longer I live, the more I come to realize that it is the natural state of the human mind. There are many who will strive to defend its sanctity and then expect you to be impressed with their efforts.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems

“Life is like a sandwich!

Birth as one slice,
and death as the other.
What you put in-between
the slices is up to you.

Is your sandwich tasty or sour?
Allan Rufus.org”
― Allan Rufus

“Mind is a flexible mirror, adjust it, to see a better world.”
― Amit Ray, Mindfulness Living in the Moment - Living in the Breath

“Create with the heart; build with the mind.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

“There never can be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save.”
― Isaac Asimov, Pebble in the Sky

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

“Keep your mind open. The meaning of things lies in how people perceive them. The same thing could mean different meanings to the same people at different times.”
― Roy T. Bennett

“Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“A good traveller is one who knows how to travel with the mind.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes

“Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.”
― Albert Einstein

“When you have reached the point where you no longer expect a response, you will at last be able to give in such a way that the other is able to receive, and be grateful. When Love has matured and, through a dissolution of the self into light, become a radiance, then shall the Lover be liberated from dependence upon the Beloved, and the Beloved also be made perfect by being liberated from the Lover.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

“Yoga means addition - addition of energy, strength and beauty to body, mind and soul.”
― Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations

“Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

“Machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate: only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers, don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty! You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure! Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world . . .”
― Charles Chaplin

“You know, it's pretty easy reading this book to see why I was angry and confused for all those years. I lived my life being told different stories: some true, some lies and I still don't know which is which. Children are born innocent. At birth we are very much like a new hard drive - no viruses, no bad information, no crap that's been downloaded into it yet. It's what we feed into that hard drive, or in my case "head drive" that starts the corruption of the files.”
― Nikki Sixx, The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star

“I want to learn how to speak to anyone at any time and make us both feel a little bit better, lighter, richer, with no commitments of ever meeting again. I want to learn how to stand wherever with whoever and still feel stable. I want to learn how to unlock the locks to our minds, my mind, so that when I hear opinions or views that don’t match up with mine, I can still listen and understand. I want to burn up lifeless habits of following maps and to-do lists, concentrated liquids to burn my mind and throat
and I want to go back to the way nature shaped me. I want to learn to go on well with whatever I have in my hands at the moment
in a natural state of mind,
certain like the sea.

I will find comfort in the rhythm of the sea.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

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

“Lose your mind and come to your senses.”
― Fritz Perls

“Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize 'The stars are words' and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind.”
― Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler

“Until you realize how easy it is for your mind to be manipulated, you remain the puppet of someone else's game.”
― Evita Ochel