Quotes by British Authors - Page 569

Curious that it is impossible for a man to be original without attracting around him a set of unoriginal minds, as though he were a honey-pot and they the flies!
Marie Corelli
Demonstrative proof is lacking, but if we thought only about those things about which such proof were available, our minds would be empty most of the time.
Theodore Dalrymple
Words, they say, are the food of minds. But, like other foods, they can do little by themselves.
Idries Shah
A donkey eats a melon, it remains a donkey
Idries Shah
The greatest journey of discovery that the human can take is not through the universe or to the remotest location on earth, it is the voyage through the human mind.
Steven Magee
There is more to the human mind than its evolutionary heritage.
Kenan Malik
Sometimes you gotta take a break from all the noise to appreciate the beauty of silence.
Robert Tew
Your mind is like a spinnin’ wheel, rotatin’ endlessly and pointlessly until threads are fed in, when it starts producing yarn. Information is the foundation to all rational thought. Seek it out. Collect it assiduously. Stock the lumber yard of your mind with as many facts as you can fit in there. Do not attempt to distinguish between important facts and trivial facts: they are all potentially important
Andy Lane
The imagination is a healthy thing, and a great many scientific discoveries could not have been made without it, but it need to be harnessed to some serious object if it is to come to anything.
Diane Setterfield
Life is a mind game of creation.
Steven Redhead
The mind is an empire unto itself.
Steven Redhead
Quiet the mind’s constant chatter of uncontrolled thoughts.
Steven Redhead
The ego of the mind can entrap you in a web of dilution.
Steven Redhead
Learn to live in the heart’s conscious, not the mind’s.
Steven Redhead
(...) My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built.
Arthur Conan Doyle
And, like the prodigal son, he had returned broken in body and also in mind to the house where he had been born, and he and his child had been welcomed with open arms.
Catherine Cookson
Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye, and while we glide along the stream of time, whatever we leave behind us is always lessening, and that which we approach increasing in magnitude.
Samuel Johnson
When we understand the true nature of mind, we start to see these thoughts merely as thoughts instead of engaging with them. They arise, abide, and pass. They have no substance and certainly no power unless we git it to them.
David Michie
When you see the truth for the first time, it is what people call a peak moment, or a moment of clarity. You get a larger percentage of what each moment of life actually contains; you are filled with life. Your mind is the gatekeeper of life, and sometimes it lets a little true life in, but most of the time it does not.Without the mind blocking life, you receive all of life, true life, and reflect it all back out.Seeing Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon for the first time is a peak moment for most people. Why does it make you feel so alive? Nothing really happens to you. Why doesn’t it feel as good the second time you see it? You are seeing the same thing. The reason is, your mind opens up when something is special.The truth is, every moment of life is special, and you can be completely open to life most of the time. You have to see the truth to see true life.
Michael Smith
I think I think, therefore I think I probably am.
David F. Porteous
The living often don’t appreciate how complicated the world looks when you are dead, because while death frees the mind from the straitjacket of three dimensions it also cuts it away from Time, which is only another dimension. So while the cat that rubbed up against his invisible legs was undoubtedly the same cat that he had seen a few minutes before, it was also quite clearly a tiny kitten and a fat, half-blind old moggy and every stage in between. All at once. Since it had started off small it looked like a white, catshaped carrot, a description that will have to do until people invent proper four-dimensional adjectives.
Terry Pratchett
The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself. Such a person is not able to experience himself 'together with' others or 'at home in' the world, but, on the contrary, he experiences himself in despairing aloneness and isolation; moreover, he does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as 'split' in various ways, perhaps as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on.
R.D. Laing
Affirmations: "I love & respect my mind, body, spirit." & "I do what best nurtures all parts of myself." & "I thrive on wholeness." Namaste!
Jay Woodman
Affirmation: What most fulfils & energizes me - mind, body, spirit - is what manifests in my life.
Jay Woodman
A man's capacity is the same as his breadth of vision.
Idries Shah
The more you condemn yourself for thinking or feeling a certain way, the more you feel stuck within your own body and mind.What if you went the other way and embraced it so totally that it was as if there was never any alternative experience to be reached for? What happens when the conflict ends?
Adam Oakley
What I value is the naked contact of a mind.
Virginia Woolf
Consciousness is who we really are; thoughts, feelings, and emotions are passing and temporary, but consciousness is existence.
Belsebuub
Thoughts repeated over time, no matter how incorrect, become consolidated in our minds as beliefs because we’ve repeatedly affirmed them over and over again.
Sam Owen
There is nothing to be lost by experimenting with the sickened human mind and body.
Steven Magee
What frightened me most was, I could no longer believe in my own life as a story. Everyone needs a story, a part to play in order to avoid the realization that life is without significance. How else do any of us survive? It’s what makes life bearable, even interesting. When it becomes neither, people say you’ve lost the plot. Or just lost it.
Amanda Craig
Minds have their own weather systems. You are in a hurricane. Hurricanes run out of energy eventually. Hold on.
Matt Haig
There are mysterious agencies of the human mind which, like roving gases, travel the world, causing pain and mutilation, without their owners having any full awareness, or even any awareness at all, of the strength and the whereabouts of these exhalations... So it is that we can be terrors to each other, and people in lonely rooms suffer humiliation and even damage because of others in whose consciousness perhaps they scarcely figure at all.
Iris Murdoch
...a well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.
Arthur C. Clarke
Let us say that you might have become a telepathic cancer, a malignant mentality which in its inevitable dissolution would have poisoned other and greater minds.
Arthur C. Clarke
We cannot learn something new and stick to it without a modular approach to application, positive reinforcement and a real change of environment.
David Amerland
You can put the human mind and body into strange states through the use of alien environments.
Steven Magee
You hear with your ears, but you listen with an open mind.
Anthony T.Hincks
A president should be approachable; understanding of people's problems and needs; he should be fair and equitable; he should listen with an open mind and a closed mouth; he shouldn't make a decision without all the facts and above all else, he must be honest to the people.Anything else and he shouldn't be president.
Anthony T.Hincks
What we call 'normal' is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.
R.D. Laing
I don't know why we live—the gift of life comes to us from I don't know what source or for what purpose; but I believe we can go on living for the reason that (always of course up to a certain point) life is the most valuable thing we know anything about and it is therefore presumptively a great mistake to surrender it while there is any yet left in the cup. In other words consciousness is an illimitable power, and though at times it may seem to be all consciousness of misery, yet in the way it propagates itself from wave to wave, so that we never cease to feel, though at moments we appear to, try to, pray to, there is something that holds one in one's place, makes it a standpoint in the universe which it is probably good not to forsake. You are right in your consciousness that we are all echoes and reverberations of the same, and you are noble when your interest and pity as to everything that surrounds you, appears to have a sustaining and harmonizing power. Only don't, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses—remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another's, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own. Don't melt too much into the universe, but be as solid and dense and fixed as you can. We all live together, and those of us who love and know, live so most. We help each other—even unconsciously, each in our own effort, we lighten the effort of others, we contribute to the sum of success, make it possible for others to live. Sorrow comes in great waves—no one can know that better than you—but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and it is blind, whereas we after a manner see …
Henry James
The wave of memory had submerged me for a whole minute, while I'd just sat staring and let it all come flooding back.
Elizabeth Wein
Now an extraordinary and helpful fact is that by making Mind the object of our attention, not only does the serenity which is its nature begin to well up of its own accord but its steady unchanging character itself helps spontaneously to repel all disturbing thoughts.
Paul Brunton
The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes.
W Somerset Maugham
The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure.
J.K. Rowling
The learnin' mind is the livin' mind... an' any sort o' smart is truesome smart, old smart or new, high smart or low.
David Mitchell
What do you think it is that makes a man"I started on the Definition. He cut me of after five words."It is not!" he said. "A wax figure could have all that, and he'd still be a wax figure, wouldn't he?" ..."Well, then, what makes a man a man is something inside him.""A soul?" I suggested."No... souls are just counters for churches to collect, all the same value, like nails. No, what makes man man is mind; it's not a thing, it's a quality, and minds aren't all the same value; they're better or worse, and the better they are, the more they mean.
John Wyndham
When indeed you positively press your face, so to speak, against the crystalline window of your eyes, your mind is apt to become a perfect vacuum.("Out Of The Deep")
Walter de la Mare
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
David Mitchell
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?
Charles Darwin
He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass: environment is but a looking glass.
James Allen
It is as though we are understanding now what (William) Blake intuited, the senses were, in Eden, spread over the whole being. It might seem, then, that our bodies still live in Eden, but our minds refuse to know it.
Peter Redgrove
The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.’ That will be useful.
Virginia Woolf
The body is the outermost layer of the mind.
David Mitchell
Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.
George Orwell
If you fill your mind with a beautiful thought, there will be no room in it for an ugly one. - King Amor
Frances Hodgson Burnett
A timid mind is apt to mistake every scratch for a mortal wound.
George Gordon Byron
I step back further, until I feel cold tiles against my back. It is then I get the glimmer that I associate with memory. As my mind tries to settle on it, it flutters away, like ashes caught in a breeze, and I realize that in my life there is a then, a before, though before what I cannot say, and there is a now, and there is nothing between the two but a long, silent emptiness that has led me here, to me and him, in this house.
S.J. Watson
Preston, I don't think this creature could ever find its way into your head. Quite apart from anything else, it seems pretty crowded and complicated to me.
Terry Pratchett
The mind can never foresee its own advance
Friedrich A. Hayek