Mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You could achieve nothing with wondered mind! you need to stop it!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The museums in children’s minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror—to protect the children from eternal grief. For my own part, though: It would have been catastrophe if I had forgotten my sister at once. I had never told her so, but she was the person I had always written for. She was the secret of whatever artistic unity I had ever achieved. She was the secret of my technique. Any creation which has any wholeness and harmoniousness, I suspect, was made by an artist or inventor with an audience of one in mind. Yes, and she was nice enough, or Nature was nice enough, to allow me to feel her presence for a number of years after she died—to let me go on writing for her. But then she began to fade away, perhaps because she had more important business elsewhere."

"For desired conclusions, we ask ourselves, "Can I believe this", but for unpalatable conclusions we ask, "Must I believe this?"

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

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

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

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