Quotes & Sayings About Closed Minds

The smallest world on earth is that which is created by a closed mind. — Michael Bassey Johnson

I wore black because I liked it. I still do, and wearing it still means something to me. It's still my symbol of rebellion
against a stagnant status quo, against our hypocritical houses of God, against people whose minds are closed to others' ideas. — Johnny Cash

What you seem so unwilling to accept, even now, is this: that the ideals which supported the old Republic had no correspondence to the fact of the old Republic; that the glorious word concealed the deed of horror; that the appearance of tradition and order cloaked the reality of corruption and chaos; that the call to liberty and freedom closed the minds, even of those who called, to the facts of privation, suppression, and sanctioned murder. — John Edward Williams

Those who read the press of their group and listen to the radio of their group are constantly reinforced in their allegiance. They learn more and more that their group is right, that its actions are justified; thus their beliefs are strengthened. At the same time, such propaganda contains elements of criticism and refutation of other groups, which will never be read or heard by a member of another group...Thus we see before our eyes how a world of closed minds establishes itself, a world in which everybody talks to himself, everybody constantly views his own certainty about himself and the wrongs done him by the Others - a world in which nobody listens to anybody else. — Jacques Ellul

This book is a tribute to the men and women who dared. Who, to this day, endure ignorance, closed minds, righteousness, and prudery. Their lives are not easy. But their cocktail parties are the best. p — Mary Roach

I began to imagine orchestration where before I heard only the cacophony of randomness. Crazy people do that all the time, unless you buy into the notion that we have the ability to perceive order and connotation in ways closed off to the minds of "sane" people. I don't. Subscribe to that notion, I mean. We are not gifted. We are not magical. We are slightly or profoundly broken. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

It's a huge disservice to classify all minds as either closed or open. I find the best minds are closed by openable windows. — Criss Jami

Christianity is, I believe, about expanded life, heightened consciousness and achieving a new humanity. It is not about closed minds, supernatural interventions, a fallen creation, guilt, original sin or divine rescue. — John Shelby Spong

Six months
It been six months since you passed
How long must these feelings of loss last ?
It's been six months since you died,
on the surface it appears I never really cried.
I hide away my tears, my sorrow, my fears.
They say time heals all wounds
Wounds may heal, but scars remain.
No one really sees the pain
that hides behind my eyes.
A heart of gold stopped beating
two twinkling eyes closed to rest
God broke our hearts that day to prove he only took the best
Never a day goes by that you're not in our hearts, our minds and in our souls.
We miss you dad. — Michael Tianias

Your minds have limits but not your hearts, for they are receptacles of endless capacity; but you must open your hearts to this knowledge, as nothing may pass through what is closed. Allah loves the brokenhearted. You are coveting a little water in a clay jug, but when you break it that water rejoins the lake from whence it came. Our egos try to prevent that reunion, and always object to any suggestion of the need to seek reunion. The main purpose of spiritual exercises in any tradition, East or West, is to enable us to overcome the objections put forward by our egos, so that we may pursue our journey to Unity Oceans. — Muhammad Nazim Adil Al-Haqqani

The state of mind must be belief, not mere hope or wish. Open-mindedness is essential for belief. Closed minds do not inspire faith, courage, and belief. — Napoleon Hill

All too often we fail to see the good in a difficult situation. Our minds are wired in such a funny way that we tend to believe just because a door closed it must be a bad thing. — Lindsey Rietzsch

I had never considered marriage, but I had an open mind, and I was to learn after a brief try at it that most open minds should be closed for repairs. — Wilson Mizner

Bridge the gap with closed minds though careful dissection of ideas and solid presentation of fact. — Maximillian Degenerez

[My mother] closed the school the next day [after a visit from Castro's soldiers], because she knew that the purpose of education was the broadening and opening of children's minds. And she couldn't be a party to the systematic closing of minds, borders, freedoms and ideals. — Gloria Estefan

I love books, food, music, sleep, people who work, heated arguments, the United States of America, and my wife and children. I dislike politicians, preachers, genteel persons, people who do not work or are on vacation, closed minds, movies, loud noises, and oiliness. — Rex Stout

And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation. — Amy Tan

Minds, like parachutes, function better when open, but, like fists, they strike harder when closed. — L.E. Modesitt Jr.

Travellers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves — Chinua Achebe

See them little scales there, how they're closed up tight like window shutters? Underneath 'em are the seeds - flat little things, flimsy as a baby's figernails - with a point at one end. If a fire comes along, the heat is gonna cause those scales to peel back and drop their seeds, while the ground is still scorching hot. Then that tiny seed is gonna burrow in and take root. I was nine years old the summer Freeda and Winnalee Malone rushed across our lives like red-hot flames, peeling back the shutters that sat over our hearts and our minds, setting free our sweetest dreams and our worst nightmares. — Sandra Kring

As suburban children we floated at night in swimming pools the temperature of blood; pools the color of Earth as seen from outer space. We would float and be naked - pretending to be embryos, pretending to be fetuses - all of us silent save for the hum of the pool filter. Our minds would be blank and our eyes closed as we floated in warm waters, the distinction between our bodies and our brains reduced to nothing - bathed in chlorine and lit by pure blue lights installed underneath diving boards. Sometimes we would join hands and form a ring like astronauts in space; sometimes when we felt more isolated in our fetal stupor we would bump into each other in the deep end, like twins with whom we didn't even know we shared a womb. — Douglas Coupland

My Manager forced me to put my beetle in my own ear, a clear waste and an act that gave me nightmares: of a burning city through which giant carnivorous lizards prowled, eating survivors off of balconies. In one particularly vivid moment, I stood on a ledge as the jaws closed in, heat-swept, and tinged with the smell of rotting flesh. Beetles intended for the tough, tight minds of children should not be used by adults. We still remember a kinder, gentler world. — Jeff VanderMeer

Our ascendancy of the past two centuries - first Europe and then the U.S. - has bred a western-centric mentality: the West is the fount of all wisdom. We think of ourselves as open-minded, but our sense of superiority has closed our minds. We never entertained the idea that China could surpass the U.S. — Martin Jacques

Do not, for one second, allow people with closed minds and no ambition to make a difference in this life silence you or stop you from going above and beyond. — Tanya Masse

Here you discover that so long as books are kept open, then minds can never be closed. — Ronald Reagan

Behind every closed door might wait a thief of minds and a collector of souls. — Dean Koontz

When people start hurling insults at you, you know their minds are closed and there's no point in debating. You disengage yourself as quickly as possible from the situation. — Judith Martin

It is my governing conviction, in all that follows, that much of modernity should be understood not as a grand revolt against the tyranny of faith, not as a movement of human liberation and progress, but as a counterrevolution, a reactionary rejection of a freedom which it no longer understands, but upon which it remains parasitic. Even when modern persons turn away from Christian conviction, there are any number of paths that have been irrevocably closed to them - either because they lead toward philosophical positions that Christianity has assumed successfully into its own story, or because they lead toward forms of "superstition" that Christianity has rendered utterly incredible to modern minds. A post-Christian unbeliever is still, most definitely, for good or for ill, post-Christian. We live in a world transformed by an ancient revolution - social, intellectual, metaphysical, moral, spiritual - the immensity of which we often only barely grasp. — David Bentley Hart

The Unconvincibles are the people who are not amenable to reason of any sort. Their minds are not only closed, but bolted and hermetically sealed. In most cases , their beliefs congealed at an early age; by the time they left their teens, they were encased in a rigid framework of thought and feeling, which no evidence or argument can penetrate. — Sydney J. Harris

To bar communication between intellectuals, who are always our best hope of peace, is particularly self-defeating and inane. It declares, inter alia, that we have a) made up our minds about what we think, b) closed our minds to what others think, and c) chosen to go on hearing nothing with which we happen to disagree. — Howard Jacobson

is satisfying, not frightening, not empty. It is an illusion of reality created by ignorance that is so unbearable. The illusion of separateness, the illusion of connectedness to disconnected hardened hearts and closed minds is the source of the suffering that we would all wish to be free of. — Mitch Halper

There's warm skin. A strong body that embraces you. Breaths that escape his gasping mouth. But... we're calling out another's name in our hearts. With our eyes closed, that person's image surfaces in our minds. It was a sweet, gentle, yet cruel night. — Yuuri Eda

the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity. She and the rebel angels, the followers of wisdom, have always tried to open minds; the Authority and his churches have always tried to keep them closed. — Philip Pullman

With the collision of the Shoemaker comet into Jupiter, the era of uniformitarian orthodoxy must come to an end. Minds that have been closed for nearly half a millennium can now be opened to see what really has happened to our planet in the past
and that past is not as distant as we might suppose. — Vine Deloria Jr.

Closed minds close doors. — Tonya Sheridan

Montalbano and Valente seemed not to have heard him, looking as if their minds were elsewhere. But in fact they were paying very close attention, like cats that, keeping their eyes closed as if asleep, are actually counting the stars. — Andrea Camilleri

The sharpest minds often ruin their lives by overthinking the next step, while the dull win the race with eyes closed. — Bethany Brookbank

Biblical social scientists have an advantage because they know truths about human nature. Those who dismiss the Bible and create surveys that don't measure crucial factors are the ones who have closed minds. Sometimes the Bible gives us clear answers and sometimes it doesn't, but it always helps us to ask the right questions. — Marvin Olasky

After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth's span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space
to another stopping place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end. — H.P. Lovecraft

If only closed minds came with closed mouths. — Anonymous

A clever, imaginative, humorous request can open closed doors and closed minds. — Percy Ross

Gradually I began to understand that it does not matter very much what problem, whether big or small, is tormenting us; the only thing that matters it that we be tormented, that we find a ground for being tormented. In other words, that we exercise our minds in order to keep certainty from turning us into idiots, that we fight to open every closed door we find in front of us. — Nikos Kazantzakis

In fact he enables us not by making us supernaturally strong, but by opening our eyes. The Holy Spirit is that power which opens eyes that are closed, hearts that are unaware and minds that shrink from too much reality. — John Taylor

Even in a world of closed minds and judgmental people, love stories continue to evolve even in the most radical of situations. There isn't a book of how to when it comes to love. Any two people can fall in love, and that's all it takes to create an amazing love story. Never feel ashamed of who you love. — Charisse Spiers

I have always thought that clarity is a form of courtesy that the philosopher owes; moreover, this discipline of ours considers it more truly a matter of honor today than ever before to be open to all minds ... This is different from the individual sciences which increasingly [interpose] between the treasure of their discoveries and the curiosity of the profane the tremendous dragon of their closed terminology. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Anytime that knowledge and a version of the truth are considered to be absolute, fundamentalism is the result, whether the arena is Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any other religious faith, as well as atheism, conservative or liberal political views, even evolution or intelligent design. Anytime our minds are closed and there is no room for dissent, we are on a slippery slope towards stagnation. — Carlton D. Pearson

Unfelt feelings don't cease to exist; they stay bottled up in our minds and our bodies. They dissipate when given expression. A heart can break only if it is closed - if it remains open there is nothing to break. — Jewel

people are standing in silent lines with their eyes half-open and their minds half-closed, — Fredrik Backman

It is well nigh impossible to talk to anyone about death, I find. Most people seem deeply embarrassed. It is like when I was a girl and nobody could talk about sex. We all did it, but nobody talked about it! We have now grown out of that silly taboo, and we must grow out of our inhibitions surrounding death. They have arisen largely because so few people see death any more, even though it is quite obviously in our midst. A cultural change must come, a new atmosphere of freedom, which will only happen if we open our closed minds. — Jennifer Worth

I turned on my heel and left her, exasperated that even as I worked my fingers to the bone to liberate women from our cloth chains, our minds remained as closed as ever to the possibility that we might deserve more than a husband, children, and growing old cooking sausage. — C.W. Gortner