Human Mind Quotes - Page 8

• The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears.

  John Muir

  Stars, Eye, Wind

  John Muir (2010). “The Wilderness Journeys”, Canongate Books

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• We know the human mind is programmed to glaze over when bored. Conversely, the mind is more alert in the presence of novelty. Our muse needs to stay seductive to keep our hands doing the right things.

  Robert Genn

  Hands, Bored, Seductive

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• The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, Eye, Technology

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• To better understand God we must first shatter our own idea of God - maybe even day after day. Maybe he's too great to stay compressed in the human mind. Maybe he splits it wide open; this is why pretentious intellectualism so often fails to comprehend the concept of God: it is only accepting of what it can explain while in the process finding higher sources offensive. What we may confidently assert is that faith is the opening that allows God, this unpredictable, unseen power, to travel in and out of the mind without all the pains of confusion.

  Criss Jami

  Pain, Ideas, Confusion

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• Without faith to act as a governor, the human mind is a runaway worry generator, a dynamo of negative expectations.

  Dean Koontz

  Faith, Expectations, Worry

  Dean Koontz (2014). “The Odd Thomas Series 7-Book Bundle: Odd Thomas, Forever Odd, Brother Odd, Odd Hours, Odd Apocalypse, Odd Interlude, Deeply Odd”, p.1153, Bantam

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• Let’s suppose that rain washes out a picnic. Who is feeling negative? The rain? Or you? What’s causing the negative feeling? The rain or your reaction? When you bump your knee against a table, the table’s fine. It’s busy being what it was made to be – a table. The pain is in your knee, not in the table. The mystics keep trying to tell us that reality is all right. Reality is not problematic. Problems exist only in the human mind. We might add: in the stupid, sleeping human mind.

  Anthony de Mello

  Pain, Stupid, Rain

  Anthony De Mello (2011). “Awareness: Conversations with the Masters”, p.80, Image

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• Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of place; if we do not understand him, it is our own fault.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Mind, Faults, Introducing

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2008). “Samuel Taylor Coleridge - The Major Works”, Oxford Paperbacks

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• What if you take a human mind, and upload it into one of these machines?

  Gary Marcus

  What If, Mind, Machines

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• There is an elasticity in the human mind, capable of bearing much, but which will not show itself, until a certain weight of affliction be put upon it; its powers may be compared to those vehicles whose springs are so contrived that they get on smoothly enough when loaded, but jolt confoundedly when they have nothing to bear.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Spring, Adversity, Mind

  Charles Caleb Colton (1823). “Remarks on the Talents of Lord Byron and the Tendencies of Don Juan”, p.199

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• A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind.

  Winston Churchill

  Effort, Mind, Bars

  Winston Churchill (1951). “War speeches”

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• The education of our people should be a lifelong process by which we continue to feed new vigor into the lifestream of the Nation through intelligent, reasoned decisions. Let us not think of education only in terms of its costs, but rather in terms of the infinite potential of the human mind that can be realized through education. Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our Nation.

  John F. Kennedy

  Dream, Mean, Intelligent

  Proclamation 3422 at the American Education Week, www.presidency.ucsb.edu. July 25, 1961.

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• An integral approach is based on one basic idea: no human mind can be 100% wrong. Or, we might say, nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time. And that means, when it comes to deciding which approaches, methodologies, epistemologies, or ways or knowing are "correct," the answer can only be, "All of them."

  Ken Wilber

  Smart, Mean, Ideas

  Foreword to "Integral Medicine: A Noetic Reader", edited by Marilyn Schlitz and Tina Hyman, 2003.

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• The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning.

  John Cage

  Mind, Tables, Turns

  John Cage (2011). “Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition”, Wesleyan University Press

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• True creativity flows only from stillness. When stillness becomes conscious, the spiritual dimension enters your life and you begin to be guided by an intelligence far greater than the human mind.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Spiritual, Creativity, Mind

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• The human mind inherently seeks intelligible order. Thus the conviction that such an order exists to be found is a crucial assumption.

  Nancy Pearcey

  Order, Mind, Assumption

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• To philosophical materialists God is no more than an idea in the human mind, and not a very important idea.

  Phillip E. Johnson

  Philosophical, Ideas, Mind

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• Stem cells are probably going to be extremely useful. But it isn't a given, and even if it were, I don't think the end justifies the means. I am not against stem cells, I think it's great. Blanket objection is not very reasonable to me-any effort to control scientific advances is doomed to fail. You cannot stop the human mind from working.

  Joseph Murray

  Failure, Mean, Science

  "A Conversation With: Joseph E. Murray; On Surgical Innovation And The Questions It Can Raise". Interview With Cornelia Dean, www.nytimes.com. September 25, 2001.

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• The losses of the natural world are our loss, their silence silences something within the human mind.

  Jay Griffiths

  Loss, Silence, Mind

  "Fifty years on, the silence of Rachel Carson's spring consumes us" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. September 25, 2012.

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• I have to admit that 'Psychology Today' was one of the first magazines I started reading, back when I was 13 or 14, because I was the kind of kid that was curious about the mysterious human mind - I hoped to learn about telekenisis, multiple personalities, psychosis, and various other cool and terrible things that happened inside people's heads.

  Dan Chaon

  Reading, Kids, Psychosis

  Interview with Jennifer Haupt, www.psychologytoday.com. February 15, 2012.

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• If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by 'mere machines,' there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend.

  Daniel Dennett

  Thinking, Long, Mind

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• The evolution of humans can not only be seen as the grand total of their wars; it is also defined by the evolution of the human mind and the development of the human consciousness.

  Friedrich Durrenmatt

  War, Mind, Development

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• All the inventions and devices ever constructed by the human hand or conceived by the human mind, no matter how delicate, how intricate and complicated, are simple, childish toys compared with that most marvelously wrought mechanism, the human body. Its parts are far more delicate, and their mutual adjustments infinitely more accurate, than are those of the most perfect chronometer ever made.

  John Harvey Kellogg

  Science, Simple, Hands

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• The entire structure of the human mind blocks out most of infinity. To a certain extent it's necessary because otherwise one would be insane, unless you have a very developed mind to deal with the endless permutations of infinity simultaneously.

  Frederick Lenz

  Block, Buddhism, Mind

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• Consider that we live in a world predicated upon fear. The underlying assumption is that human beings are innately evil and must be groomed and controlled. That is the dichotomy that is set up within the human mind, good and evil.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Evil, Humanity

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• The human mind prefers something which it can recognize to something for which it has no name, and, whereas thousands of persons carry field glasses to bring horses, ships, or steeples close to them, only a few carry even the simplest pocket microscope. Yet a small microscope will reveal wonders a thousand times more thrilling than anything which Alice saw behind the looking-glass.

  David Fairchild

  Horse, Science, Glasses

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