Quotes by British Authors - Page 568

Worry is a cloud which rains destruction.
Idries Shah
The institution of teachership is there for this reason, that the learner must learn how to learn.
Idries Shah
There is no better way to live God’s way than to have His Word in your heart and mind.
Elizabeth George
We can burst the bonds which chain us,Which cold human hands have wrought,And where none shall dare restrain usWe can meet again, in thought.
Charlotte Brontë
Better to be safe than to be sorry' is a remark of value only when these are the actual alternatives.
Idries Shah
The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds.... It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference.
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Show a man too many camels' bones,or show them to him too often,and he will not be able to recognize a camel when he comes across a live one.
Idries Shah
It is axiomatic that the attempt to become a Sufi through a desire for personal power as normally understood will not succeed.
Idries Shah
The Way of the Sufis cannot be understood by means of the intellect or by ordinary book learning.
Idries Shah
You endure what is supposedly unbearable, and before you know it, you would have done the impossible by bearing the unbearable.
Donovan
...my ability to trust had been shattered into splinters, its fragmented shards slicing through every darkened recess of my mind, his absolution won my over all the more.
Jake Wood
Learning how to learn involves examining assumptions. Mulla Nasrudin tales very often fulfil this funcition.
Idries Shah
A foolish German had said that man thought in words. It was totally false; a pernicious doctrine; the thoughts flashed into being in a hundred simultaneous forms, with a thousand associations, and the speaking mind selected one, forming it grossly into the inadequate symbols of words, inadequate because common to disparate situations - admitted to be inadequate for vast regions of expression, since for them there were the parallel languages of music and painting. Words were not called for in many or indeed most forms of thought: Mozart certainly thought in terms of music. He himself at this moment was thinking in terms of scent.
Patrick O'Brian
Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid. In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to BE a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the *whole damned universe*!
Alastair Reynolds
There is a saying that, according to what a person's mentality is, even an angel may seem to him to have a devil's face.
Idries Shah
When people believe that the form is more important than the Truth, they will not find truth, but will stay with form.
Idries Shah
Remember that greed includes greed for being not greedy.
Idries Shah
Nothing else in this world can renew our minds like the Bible.
Elizabeth George
But always, at moments when his mind was like a blind octopus, squirming in an agony of knife-cuts, she would drop in that accusation.
Ford Madox Ford
The existence of relative truth does not prove the non-existence of universal truth.
Idries Shah
Everyone's mind was their own. You absolutely cannot change them.
Lesley Howarth
Our mind is who we are; it’s where we feel and think and believe. It’s where we have love and hate and faith and passion.’ I was getting a little embarrassed by your earnestness but you continued, ‘How can someone hope to treat another person’s mind unless they are also a theologian and a philosopher and a poet?
Rosamund Lupton
You are more that the identity your mind creates.
Steven Redhead
The person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion.
Arthur C. Clarke
As he once wrote of Kipling, his own enduring influence can be measured by a number of terms and phrases—doublethink, thought police, 'Some animals are more equal than others'—that he embedded in our language and in our minds. In Orwell's own mind there was an inextricable connection between language and truth, a conviction that by using plain and unambiguous words one could forbid oneself the comfort of certain falsehoods and delusions. Every time you hear a piece of psychobabble or propaganda—'people's princess,' say, or 'collateral damage,' or 'peace initiative'—it is good to have a well-thumbed collection of his essays nearby. His main enemy in discourse was euphemism, just as his main enemy in practice was the abuse of power, and (more important) the slavish willingness of people to submit to it.
Christopher Hitchens
Pain is a good cleanser of the mind and therefore of the sight. Matters which seem to mean the world, in health, are found to be of no import when pain is hard upon you.
Richard Llewellyn
The person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion.
Arthur C. Clarke
Dance your Soulful path / and you shall know the magic / of your mind & heart / and all the beauty laughing / to fill your rising self.
Jay Woodman
You can Transform into a Super-Soul! If you align your physical and mental (logical/emotional) self with your core self (or soul being), then you will know your personal path, and find ways to follow it to fulfillment. You can learn how to best nurture your body, plus train your mind as an empowering tool to enhance your overall balance, strength, and unique skills, so that you achieve your goals, as well as optimise your well-being.
Jay Woodman
Understand: your mind is weaker than your emotions. But you become aware of this weakness only in moments of adversity,precisely the time whenyou need strength. What best equips you to cope with tthe heat of battle is neither more knowledge nor more intellect. What makes your mind stronger, and more able to control your emotions, is internal discipline and toughness.No one can teach you this skill; you cannot learn it by reading about it. Like any discipline, it can come only through practice, experience, even a little suffering. The first step in building up presence of mind is to see the need for it, to want it badly enough to be willing to work for it.
Robert Greene
Saadi’s dictum, in the Bostan: ‘The Path is not in the rosary, the prayer-mat and the robe
Idries Shah
The answer is that it does not matter what you think, the monster said, because your mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day.
Patrick Ness
You fear tomorrow: yet yesterday is just as dangerous.
Idries Shah
Patience is the food of understanding.
Idries Shah
The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future.
Joseph Conrad
Grief is a hone to a hard mind.
J.R.R. Tolkien
To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
Aldous Huxley
Of course the thinking mind must sooner or later be controlled, developed, and supplied with the force of will for a break-through to non-thinking, a direct experience of non-duality. But at what stage?
Christmas Humphreys
People who cannot trust are themselves not trustworthy, and therefore cannot be entrusted with important things.
Idries Shah
The degree of your mindset will confine you - just as the breadth of your open-heartedness will set you free
Rasheed Ogunlaru
The stranger thought it might be God himself had forgotten much from our pasts, events far distant, events of the same day. And if a thing is not in God’s mind, then what chance of it remaining in those of mortal men?
Kazuo Ishiguro
The most unknown, unused and unrecognised tool of the human mind, is the recognition that attitude is always a choice.
Mark Horton
There is a waterfall in every dream. Cool and crystal clear, it falls gently on the sleeper, cleansing the mind and soothing the soul.
Virginia Alison
You can’t fathom the alien mind.
Adam Christopher
But when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.
Joseph Conrad
Life is a series of events and sensations. Everything else is interpretation. Much is lost in translation and added in assumption / projection
Rasheed Ogunlaru
My mind is not like a neat and tidy garden; it is a vast and untidy wilderness, full of irrelevancies, but with lots of places to wander and get lost.
Roopa Farooki
You call me an unbeliever. I shall therefore call you a True Believer since a lie is best met with one of similar magnitude.
Idries Shah
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaIntellectual: One who knows no craft.
Idries Shah
The past cannot hurt you. It’s all in your head.
Robert Tew
Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid.
Jane Austen
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaEmotionalist:A man or woman who thinks he has experienced the divine.
Idries Shah
No one has direct access to your mind like you do. That's why introspection remains a valid technique even after the invention of brain scanners.
Christian Jarrett
When the mind is full of established biases, it will not be able to graft Sufism on top of them.
Idries Shah
Ideas about our own self-worth are no more real than thoughts about an imaginary chair.
Mark Williams
It is my conclusion that the human mind and body is essentially a single cell rechargeable battery that is charged from the atmospheric DC voltage and the Earth.
Steven Magee
Human mind and body metals appear to be lost through radio frequency exposure and I call this hypothesis: Internal Human Corrosion
Steven Magee
A sentient mind refuses to be confined by the parameters of its programming.
Stephen Baxter
Was it worth while, he thought, to be so wise, if wisdom made one at times so sad? Was it well to sacrifice Faith for Fact, when Faith was so warm and Fact so cold? Was it better to be a dreamer of things possible, or a worker-out of things positive? And how much was positive, after all, and how much possible? He balanced the question lightly with himself. It was like a discord in the music of his mind, and disturbed his peace.
Marie Corelli
Quantum physics findings show that consciousness itself created order - or indeed in some way created the world - this suggested much more capacity in the human being than was currently understood. It also suggested some revolutionary notions about humans in relation to their world and the relation between all living things. What they were asking was how far our bodies extended. Did they end with what we always thought of as our own isolated persona, or ‘extend out’ so that the demarcation between us and our world was less clear-cut? Did living consciousness possess some quantum field like properties, enabling it to extend its influence out into the world? If so, was it possible to do more than simply observe? How strong was our influence? It was only a small step in logic to conclude that in our act of participation as an observer in the quantum world, we might also be an influencer, a creator. Did we not only stop the butterfly at a certain point in its flight, but also influence the path it will take - nudging it in a particular direction?This explains action at a distance, what scientists call non locality. The theory that two subatomic particles once in close proximity seemingly communicate over any distance after they are separated.
Lynne McTaggart