Dull Mind Quotes & Sayings

A continuous perception is taking place deep within the mind. It is hard to hear that signal because it is blurred over by your own thoughts, desires, and fears. It is blurred over by your emotional swings. You become dull. — Frederick Lenz

Your mind will never be dull, if you remember there is never enough to learn for it to be to full. — Benny Bellamacina

There are ... otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they must attribute the swift flight of fancy to some illness of the psyche, and thus it happens that this or that writer is said to create not other than while imbibing intoxicating drink or that his fantasies are the result of overexcited nerves and resulting fever. But who can fail to know that, while a state of psychical excitement caused by the one or other stimulant may indeed generate some lucky and brilliant ideas, it can never produce a well-founded, substantial work of art that requires the utmost presence of mind. — E.T.A. Hoffmann

Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all. — John Steinbeck

To be aware is an extraordinary state of mind
to be aware of your surroundings, of the trees, the bird that is singing, the sunset behind you.
to be aware of the beauty of the land, the ripple of the water, - just to be aware, choiclessly.
Please do this as you are going along. Listen to these birds; do not name, do not recognize the species, but just listen to the sound.
Listen to the mouvement of your own thoughts; do not control them, do not shape them,do not say:" this is right, that is wrong"
Just move with them.
That is awareness in which there is no choice, no condemnation, no judgement, no comparison or interpretation, only mere observation.
That makes your mind highly sensitive.
The moment you go name, you have gone back, your mind becomes dull, because that is what you are used to.

J. Krishnamurti — J.Krishnamurti

The man is a humbug - a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: Walter Helwich merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull ... — C.S. Lewis

I find it dull when my heart meets my mind — Laura Marling

It was on a meteorologically challenged November night that Frankenstein infused the spark of being into the creature and saw its dull yellow eye open. Breathless horror filled Frankenstein's heart as a vision of the next twenty years flashed through his mind. There would be responsibilities--schooling, education, clothing--and he was a lone parent! — Lawrence Held

Some days my thoughts are just cocoons
all cold, and dull, and blind, They hang from dripping branches in the grey woods of my mind; And other days they drift and shine
such free and flying things! I find the gold-dust in my hair, left by their brushing wings. — Karle Wilson Baker

Recreation is intended to the mind as whetting is to the scythe, to sharpen the edge of it, which otherwise would grow dull and blunt,
as good no scythe as no edge. — Joseph Hall

[The little black boy] had seen Tarzan bring down a buck, just as Numa, the lion, might have done ... Tibo had shuddered at the sight, but he had thrilled, too, and for the first time there entered his dull, Negroid mind a vague desire to emulate his savage foster parent. But Tibo, the little black boy, lacked the divine spark which had permitted Tarzan, the white boy, to benefit by his training in the ways of the fierce jungle. In imagination he was wanting, and imagination is but another name for super-intelligence.
Imagination it is which builds bridges, and cities, and empires. The beasts know it not, the blacks only a little, while to one in a hundred thousand of earth's dominant race it is given as a gift from heaven that man may not perish from the earth. — Edgar Rice Burroughs

A dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters a desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic. And — George Eliot

It was a godless sound; one of those low-keyed, insidious outrages of Nature which are not meant to be. To call it a dull wail, a doom-dragged whine, or a hopeless howl of chorused anguish and stricken flesh without mind would be to miss its most quintessential loathsomeness and soul-sickening overtones. — H.P. Lovecraft

The real secret behind top athletes' genius, then, may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player's mind as he stands at the center of a hostile crowdnoise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all. — David Foster Wallace

They strive to attain their wishes by every available means, instructing and compelling themselves to dishonest and difficult acts. And when their labour is without reward, it is the fruitless disgrace that tortures them - they are not grieved to have desired evil things but to have desired in vain. Then remorse for what they began lays hold of them, and the fear of beginning again, and thence creeps in the agitation of mind which can find no relief - because neither can they rule nor can they obey their desires. And then comes the hesitancy of a life failing to clear a way for itself, and the dull wasting of a soul lying torpid amidst forsaken hopes. — Seneca.

The universe is a giant mind. Some people have the ability to tap into that mind, we call them psychic. Others don't, we call them dull ... but they have potential. — Frederick Lenz

Much of the stress and emptiness that haunt us can be traced back to our lack of attention to beauty. Internally, the mind becomes coarse and dull if it remains unvisited by images and thoughts that hold the radiance of beauty. — John O'Donohue

Maintain a prayerful frame of heart in the intervals of duty. What reason can be assigned why our hearts are so dull, so careless, so wandering, when we hear or pray, but that there have been long intermissions in our communion with God? If that divine unction, that spiritual fervour, and those holy impressions, which we obtain from God while engaged in the performance of one duty, were preserved to enliven and engage us in the performance of another, they would be of incalculable service to keep our hearts serious and devout. For this purpose, frequent ejaculations between stated and solemn duties are of most excellent use: they not only preserve the mind in a composed and pious frame, but they connect one stated duty, as it were, with another, and keep the attention of the soul alive to all its interests and obligations. — John Flavel

BUT MOST PEOPLE ARE RATHER STUPID AND WASTE THEIR LIVES. HAVE YOU NOT SEEN THAT? HAVE YOU NOT LOOKED DOWN FROM THE HORSE AT A CITY AND THOUGHT HOW MUCH IT RESEMBLED AN ANT HEAP, FULL OF BLIND CREATURES WHO THINK THEIR MUNDANE LITTLE WORLD WAS REAL? YOU SEE THE LIGHTED WINDOWS AND WHAT YOU WANT TO THINK IS THAT THERE MAY BE MANY INTERESTING STORIES BEHIND THEM, BUT WHAT YOU KNOW IS THAT REALLY THERE ARE JUST DULL, DULL SOULS, MERE CONSUMERS OF FOOD, WHO THINK THEIR INSTINCTS ARE EMOTIONS AND THEIR TINY LITTLE LIVES OF MORE ACCOUNT THAN A WHISPER OF WIND.
The blue glow was bottmless. It seemed to be sucking her own thoughts out of her mind.
'No,' whispered Susan, 'no, I've never thought like that.'
Death stood up abruptly and turned away. YOU MAY FIND OUT THAT IT HELPS, he said. — Terry Pratchett

My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. — Arthur Conan Doyle

If the mind is open the individual will soon perceive the preciousness of a truth which initially appeared rather dull to him but now is illumined by the spirit's light. — Watchman Nee

The human mind searches for cause and effect, always; and we all prefer the weird and thrilling to the dull and commonplace as an answer. — Jack Finney

What America demands in her black champions is a brilliant, powerful body and a dull, bestial mind. — Eldridge Cleaver

Frost interviewing Noel Coward and Margaret Mead. Sir Noel's view of life is Sir Noel. Mead's mind is large and open, like Buckminster Fuller's. She found thoughts dull that suggest that men are superior to animals or plants. — John Cage

Baseball is a dull game only for those with dull minds. — Red Smith

(Television) rots the senses in the head!
It kills imagination dead!
It clogs and clutters up the mind!
It makes a child so dull and blind
He can no longer understand
A fantasy, a fairyland!
His brain becomes as soft as cheese!
His powers of thinking rust and freeze!
He cannot think -he only sees! — Roald Dahl

This may be set as a criterion to any-yes, 'to all: When such an experiment, such a trial, draws or tires, or makes the mind foggy or dull or become as a drain upon the physical energies, know you are attuning wrong-and static has entered, from some source! For the universal consciousness is constructive, not destructive in any manner-but ever constructive in its activity with the elements that make up an entity's experience in the physical consciousness. 792-2 — Edgar Cayce

Whenever you squander attention on something that doesn't put your brain through its paces and stimulate change, your mind stagnates a little and life feels dull. — Winifred Gallagher

The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time ... Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers - common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I've heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons. — Stephen King

They grabbed for me,
but he bared his teeth in a smile
that was anything but friendly -
and they halted.
"No more household chores, no more tasks,"
he said, his voice an erotic caress.
Their yellow eyes went glazed and dull,
their sharp teeth gleaming as their mouths slackned.
"Tell the others, too. Stay out of her cell,
and don't touch her.
If you do, you're to take your own daggers and
gut yourselves. Understood?"
Dazed, numb nods, then they blinked and straightened. I hid my trembling. Glamour, mind control - whatever it was he had done, it worked. They beckoned - but didn't dare touch me.
Rhysand smiled. "You're welcome," he purred as I walked out. — Sarah J. Maas

Let hunger sharpen your awareness. Abstain liquor and frivolous recreation, which dull the mind and weaken the body. — Laura Joh Rowland

Life in the auntring, or for a settled man, is repetitive, as I said; and so it can be dull. Nothing new happens. The mind always wants new happenings. — Ursula K. Le Guin

As a rule it will listen to neither a dull speaker nor a bright one. It refuses all persuasion. The dull speaker wearies it and sends it far away in idle dreams; the bright speaker throws out stimulating ideas which it goes chasing after and is at once unconscious of him and his talk. You cannot keep your mind from wandering, if it wants to; it is master, not you.
**About the mind — Mark Twain

Mind, Sancho, I do not say that a proverb aptly brought in is objectionable; but to pile up and string together proverbs at random makes conversation dull and vulgar. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Brutality is the refuge of the dull of mind, ka-lyrra. Only a fool conquers when he might instead seduce.

~Adam Black to Gabrielle O'Callaghan — Karen Marie Moning

Being a fan of authentic Dada, I find today's art - what I call 'Bankers' Dada' - mind-numbingly dull. The most challenging work I've seen of late is by The British Art Resistance. Their document, 'A Call for Heroes in an Age of Cowards', is apt in these days of witless chancers. — Billy Childish

My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world. — Arthur Conan Doyle

The witch's weapon is fear. She aims to put as much into your heart as she can before she takes it. Either that or she'll simply turn you to stone. If that sounds preferable to death, it is not. The skin hardens to rock. The blood stops flowing. The living flesh is petrified, but the mind is not." The dull patter of rain was the only sound in the cavernous Armory. None of the girls moved. Most stared at the discarded weapons strewn across the floor. "The witch uses fear, but so do we. And there's nothing she fears more than love." She continued her slow patrol, locking eyes with whichever cadet was in front of her. "She has no answer for it. That is the magic of a Princess of the Shield. That is how you defeat a witch. Whoever scares the other in the core of her heart first, wins. That's the game. — M.A. Larson

Emerson said, "To the dull mind, all of nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world sparkles with light." The illumined mind has shifted to the light. — Sam Beckford

Think of a flabby person covered with layers of fat. That is what your mind can become - flabby, covered with layers of fat till it becomes too dull and lazy to think, to observe, to explore, to discover ... not wanting to be disturbed or questioned into wakefulness. — Anthony De Mello

The drug, the Sadness, is working, breaking the horrible, dull, boring, mind-numbing happiness imposed on him and everyone else in NewLand by the antidepressants in the city's water supply. — Pleasefindthis

A thinking puppet is the mind of life:
Its choice is the work of elemental strengths
That know not their own birth and end and cause
And glimpse not the immense intent they serve.
In this nether life of man drab-hued and dull,
Yet filled with poignant small ignoble things,
The conscious Doll is pushed a hundred ways
And feels the push but not the hands that drive.
For none can see the masked ironic troupe
To whom our figure-selves are marionettes,
Our deeds unwitting movements in their grasp,
Our passionate strife an entertainment's scene. — Sri Aurobindo

Although people call love a capricious and unaccountable emotion that arises like an illness, nonetheless it has its own laws and reasons, like everything else. If these laws have been little studied so far, that is because a person struck down by love is in no condition to observe with a scholar's eye as the impression steals into his soul and shackles his emotions like a dream, as first his eyes go blind, at which moment his pulse and then his heart begin beating harder, all of a sudden there arises as of yesterday an undying devotion, the desire to sacrifice oneself; one's I gradually vanishes and crosses over into him or her; the mind becomes wither unusually dull or unusually sharp; the will surrenders to the will of another; and the head bows, the knees shake and the tears and fever come. — Ivan Goncharov

He was one of those persons whom one loves not because of some lustrous streak of talent (this retired businessman possessed none), but because every moment spent with them fits exactly the gauge of one's life. There are friendships like circuses, waterfalls, libraries; there are others comparable to old dressing gowns. You found nothing especially attractive about Maximov's mind if you took it apart: his ideas were conservative, his tastes undistinguished: but somehow or other these dull components formed a wonderfully comfortable and harmonious whole. — Vladimir Nabokov

We cannot feel strongly toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable; nor yet toward the wholly like because it is stale - identity must always be dull company. The power of other natures over us lies in a stimulating difference which causes excitement and opens communication, in ideas similar to our own but not identical, in states of mind attainable but not actual. — Charles Horton Cooley

To write books you need not only comfort and solitude - and solitude is never easy to attain in a working-class home - you also need piece of mind. You can't settle in to anything, you can't command the spirit of hope in which anything has got to be created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you. — George Orwell

The discovery of the cause is merely intellectual, so obviously it does not free the mind from its dependency. The mere intellectual acceptance of an idea, or the emotional acquiescence in an ideology, cannot free the mind from being dependent on something which will give it stimulation. What frees the mind from dependence is seeing the whole structure and nature of stimulation and dependence and how that dependence makes the mind stupid, dull and inactive. Seeing the totality of it alone frees the mind. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation. — Catherine Drinker Bowen

It is a dull and obtuse mind, that must divide in order to distinguish; but it is a still worse that distinguishes in order to divide. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Where do you get your ideas?' people are always asking authors they admire, which I've always thought was another way of asking, 'How did you get my ideas, which I didn't know I had until you put words to them?' We are known, appreciated, even cherished by our favorite writers; every word of our favorite books seems to have been written for us. Within their sentences and paragraphs, those writers are forever available, forever patient, including us in their compassionate recognition of the impossible, exhausting complexity of being human (those "many thousand" selves), never ignoring us or abandoning us or finding us dull. It's you, they whisper, as we turn their pages, you are the one I've been waiting to tell everything to. — Suzanne Berne

Therefore, have done with this nonsense: you have no ground for hope: dismiss, at once, these hurtful thoughts and foolish wishes from your mind, and turn to your own duty, and the dull blank life that lies before you. You might have known such happiness was not for you. — Anne Bronte

As I grew up, everything started getting grey and dull. I could still remember the amazing intensity of the world I'd lived in as a child, but I thought the dulling of perception was an inevitable consequence of age - just as a lens of the eye is bound gradually to dim. I didn't understand that clarity is in the mind. — Keith Johnstone

Fifteen years was a long time to be stranded anywhere, particularly somewhere as mind-boggingly dull as Earth. — Douglas Adams

It is only the dull, sleepy mind that creates and clings to habit. A mind that is attentive from moment to moment - attentive to what it is saying, attentive to the movement of its hands, of its thoughts, of its feelings - will discover that the formation of further habits has come to an end. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Our schools display an enormous bias in educating the mind rather than the whole person. We place major emphasis on reasoning, logic and math, with almost no concern for emotions, intuition and creativity. Our students become memorizing mimics and dull conformists, rather than exciting and feeling creators. — John Bradshaw

The calm man is not the man who is dull. You must not mistake Sattva for dullness or laziness. The calm man is the one who has control over the mind waves. Activity is the manifestation of inferior strength, calmness, of the superior. — Swami Vivekananda

The enemy is the tyranny of the dull mind. — Tom Robbins

It was a joy! Words weren't dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you. — Charles Bukowski

What ails the truth is that it is mainly uncomfortable, and often dull. The human mind seeks something more amusing, and more caressing. — H.L. Mencken

A mind is only as sharp as the knife, that strives to cut through thoughts
too tough for the blade, before it breaks or goes dull. — Anthony Liccione

The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing merry-go-round. True, they are a merry-go-round of ill-gaited and wind-broken horses, painted first in pastel colors, then in dull grays and browns, but perplexing and intolerably dizzy the thing is, as never were the merry-go-rounds of childhood or adolescence; as never, surely, were the certain-coursed, dynamic roller-coasters of youth. For most men and women these thirty years are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life. — F Scott Fitzgerald

What madness, to love a man as something more than human! I lived in a fever, convulsed with tears and sighs that allowed me neither rest nor peace of mind. My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry. Everything that was not what my friend had been was dull and distasteful. I had heart only for sighs and tears, for in them alone I found some shred of consolation. — Augustine Of Hippo

People who sleep only two or three hours in the twenty-four are always geniuses. The ones you hear about, anyway. Never mind if the ones you don't hear about are dolts. Insomnia is genius. It must be. Think of all the work you could do the thoughts you could think, the books you could read, the love you could make, while the dull clods lie snoring. — Ursula K. Le Guin

We have strayed from the Immortal's ways And worship with a dull and senseless mind Idols, the workmanship of our own hands, And images and figures of dead men. — Justin Martyr

That ought to make his face, or the sound of his voice, more precious to her mind, but strangely, this wasn't so. What was left in his absence was an empty, sorrowful discomfort. She wondered if it wouldn't eventually grow dull or dim if she worried at it enough, or softened and more — Cherie Priest

the mind itself suggests to itself many perverted, vicious forms of pleasure? - in the first place arrogance, excessive self-esteem, swaggering precedence over other men, a shortsighted, nay, a blind devotion to his own interests, dissolute luxury, excessive delight springing from the most trifling and childish causes, and also talkativeness, pride that takes a pleasure in insulting others, sloth, and the decay of a dull mind which goes to sleep over itself. — Seneca.

He that comes to Christ cannot, it is true, always get on as fast as he would. Poor coming soul, thou art like the man that would ride full gallop whose horse will hardly trot. Now the desire of his mind is not to be judged of by the slow pace of the dull jade he rides on, but by the hitching and kicking and spurring as he sits on his back. Thy flesh is like this dull jade, it will not gallop after Christ, it will be backward though thy soul and heaven lie at stake. — John Bunyan

Upon occasion we should go as far as intoxication ... Drink washes cares away, stirs the mind from its lowest depths ... But in liberty moderation is wholesome, and so it is in wine ... We ought not indulge too often, for fear the mind contract a bad habit, yet it is right to draw it toward elation and release and to banish dull sobriety for a little. — Seneca The Younger

You compare yourself with somebody, compare yourself with an example, with the ultimate ideal. Comparative judgment makes the mind dull; it does not sharpen the mind, it does not make the mind comprehensive, inclusive, because, when you are all the time comparing, what has happened? You see the sunset, and you immediately compare that sunset with the previous sunset. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Does it ever happen to you,' said Natasha to her brother when they had settled down in the sitting-room, 'does it ever happen to you to feel as if there were nothing more to come - nothing; that everything good is past? And to feel not exactly dull, but sad?'
'I should think so!' he replied. 'I have felt like that when everything was all right and everyone was cheerful. The thought comes into my mind that I'm already tired of it all, and that we must all die. Once in the regiment I didn't go to some merrymaking where there was music ... and suddenly I felt so depressed ... — Leo Tolstoy

But this is one of the things that makes rap at its best so human. It doesn't force you to pretend to be only one thing or another, to be a saint or a sinner. It recognizes that you can be true to yourself and still have unexpected dimensions and opposing ideas. Having a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other is the most common thing in the world. The real bullshit is when you act like you don't have contradictions inside you, that you're so dull and unimaginative that your mind never changes or wanders into strange, unexpected places. — Jay-Z

Oh teach the mind t' aetherial heights to rise,
And view familiar, in its native skies,
Thy source of good; thy splendor to descry,
And on thy self, undazled, fix her eye.
Oh quicken this dull mass of mortal clay;
Shine through the soul, and drive its clouds away!
For thou art Light. In thee the righteous find
Calm rest, and soft serenity of mind;
Thee they regard alone; to thee they tend;
At once our great original and end,
At once our means, our end, our guide, our way,
Our utmost bound, and our eternal stay! — Boethius

If we are in the same state of mind, we just self-reflect, things are dull and gray and kind of boring. — Frederick Lenz

It is the sign of a dull mind to dwell upon the cares of the body, to prolong exercise, eating and drinking and other bodily functions. These things are best done by the way; all your attention must be given to the mind. — Epictetus

The enemy of the black is not the white. The enemy of capitalist is not communist, the enemy of homosexual is not heterosexual, the enemy of Jew is not Arab, the enemy of youth is not the old, the enemy of hip is not redneck, the enemy of Chicano is not gringo and the enemy of women is not men. We all have the same enemy. The enemy is the tyranny of the dull mind. The enemy is every expert who practices technocratic manipulation, the enemy is every proponent of standardization and the enemy is every victim who is so dull and lazy and weak as to allow himself to be manipulated and standardized. — Tom Robbins

It was important for a person not to let their body or mind become slow and dull. Oba believed it was important to learn new things. He believed it was important to grow. He thought it was important for a person to use what they had learned. That was how people grew. — Terry Goodkind

You only lose energy when life becomes dull in your mind. Your mind gets bored and therefore tired of doing nothing. — Norman Vincent Peale

The Man who has not Music in his Soul, Or is not touch'd with Concord of sweet Sounds, Is fit for Treasons, Strategems, and Spoils, The Motions of his Mind are dull as Night, And his Affections dark as Erebus: Let no such Man be trusted.17 Copying a passage — Kevin J. Hayes

Was this what it was like to be human? Were people actually so miserable and brainless that they looked forward to this - to spending Friday night, precious time off from wage slave drudgery, sitting in front of a television with a can of beer? It was mind-numbingly dull, and to my horror, I found that I was getting used to it. — Jeff Lindsay

Surely education has no meaning unless it helps you understand the vast experience of life with all its subtleties, with its extraordinary beauty, its sorrows and joys. You may earn degrees, you may have a series of letters after your name and land a good job, but then what? What is the point of it all if in the process your mind becomes dull, weary, stupid? — Jiddu Krishnamurti

The world is a wonderfully weird place, consensual reality is significantly flawed, no institution can be trusted, certainty is a mirage, security a delusion, and the tyranny of the dull mind forever threatens
but our lives are not as limited as we think they are, all things are possible, laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it's love and love alone that really matters. — Tom Robbins

We must come to the Bible with the purpose of self-exposure consciously in mind. I suspect not many people make more than a token stab in that direction. It's extremely hard work. It makes Bible study alternately convicting and reassuring, painful and soothing, puzzling and calming, and sometimes dull - but not for long if our purpose is to see ourselves better. — Larry Crabb

Even a brilliant mind sometimes needs a dull stone to sharpen itself. — Ken Liu

Something went greatly wrong in our collective history and the starting point of it was the industrial revolution. Our school systems are focussed on a single objective: to produce model citizens for society in order to feed this machine and prevent its breakdown. That's why our school systems have no interest in developing models that actually require and stimulate useful values in people, such as courage or imagination or inventiveness.
None of these are taught in our schools, on the contrary the system focuses on memorizing. Memorizing is a way of overloading the mind with mental baggage it doesn't really need. Besides being horribly dull and stiffening the effect of 20 years of abundant memorization training is modern man: an unimaginative creature stuffed with useless knowledge and unable to clean his mind of this information dirt: our school systems are purposely constructed to deliver mental automatons that are unable to think creatively. — Martijn Benders

The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic. — George Eliot

As Liljana sat stitching a sampler or darning a sock, she dreamed her way into life as a grown woman with her own household to run, her own home to tidy, her own children to mind, and her own husband to cheer after a long day's work as they sat together by the fire. The life that future generations would dismiss as dull and degrading offered Liljana the liberating prospect of being mistress in her own home rather than living to serve others. — Fiorella De Maria

The tendency is to blame boredom on the environment. "This town is really dull" or "What a boring speaker." The particular town or speaker is never dull, it is you experiencing the boredom, and you can eliminate it by doing something else with your mind or energy at that moment. — Wayne Dyer

Nature is a wary wily long-breathed old Witch, tough-lived as a Turtle and divisible as the Polyp, repullulative in a thousand Snips and Cuttings, integra et in toto! She is sure to get the better of Lady MIND in the long run, and to take her revenge too transforms our To Day into a Canvass dead-colored to receive the dull featureless Portait of Yesterday. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Literature, I have always thought, is in most places and companies a singularly dull and uninteresting thing to talk about, but one may, as a rule, hate literary conversation, and yet at the right moment, with all its powers of feeling, the mind in silence may feel what it owes to literature. — William Hurrell Mallock

Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use ... time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space - for wilderness and public space - must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space. — Rebecca Solnit

It's funny how insomnia has a way of hauling faded memories up from the cellar of the mind, unearthing buried bits of nostalgia from deep within and spreading the broken, jagged pieces out in front of you like a display of junk at a garage sale. It makes you feel cheap and guilty when you didn't do a thing in the world to kindle the dull burn in your veins or the sting in your eyes. Some nights the painful past unexpectedly pushes up through the floorboards like an ugly nightmarish weed, and by doing so, cultivates and nurtures an entirely new species of headache. — Adam Young

Certain coincidence is wonderful. Certain meetings are memorable. Sometimes you meet some people for just a moment and they leave indelible footprints on your mind. They give you the reasons to ponder over and over. They become your food for thought. Though they go, their presence is felt within the innermost of the heart and the soul; especially when such people were a reason for a smile, or they were a perfect fit for a vacuum or probably they were a heavenly sent or maybe they were an epitome of a great union; when their light could shine to brighten the dark side of our lives; when they knew how to arouse interest even in the face of dull atmosphere; when they did understand silence and know the value and power of words; when even their absence is felt more than their presence. You can't just forget about such people. Though they leave, they live within our hearts, mind, body and soul. — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Thank god I'm free from all that now", he thought. And yet even as he said it he was not quit sure whether he spoke sincerely. When he was under the influence of passion he had felt a singualr vigour, and his mind has worked with unwonted force. He was more alive, there was an excitement of sheer being, an eager vehemence of soul, which made life now a little dull. — W. Somerset Maugham

A subtle-witted man is like an arrow, which, rending little surface, enters deeply, but they whose minds are dull resemble stones dashing with clumsy force, but never piercing. — Magha

Many people conceive of religion as something apart from everyday affairs of the world. They think of it in terms of ceremony or ritual or sermons and often it strikes them as being dull or not particularly interesting. Religion may be described in many ways. I like to think of it as a medicine, a healing medicine for the mind. — Norman Vincent Peale

HIs slower mind could not keep pace with her swift reactions; his emotions, not easily aroused, were still less easily subdued. Always he felt himself left far behind her, dull, clumsy, insensitive, too fond, too gross, too awkward. — Winifred Holtby

It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there. — Graham Greene

I tumbled into the taxi alone, closing the door closed with a dull thud before I could possibly change my mind. Not like this, I remember thinking. Whatever this thing is between us, it could only be tainted and cheapened by a semi-drunken encounter on the night of our first meeting. As the car pulled away I stared back at him. The thought that I might never see him again, that I might never know what it would feel like to be kissed by him, seemed unbearably cruel.
At a crossroads, I had been faced with a choice: two possible versions of my future mapped out ahead of me. But I didn't feel like I had made any sort of decision. All I had done was run away. — Catherine Sanderson

The pursuit of natural knowledge, the investigation of the world - mental and material - in which we live, is not a dull and spiritless affair: rather is it a voyage of adventure of the human mind, a holiday for reckless and imaginative souls. — Archibald Hill

Everything failed to subdue me. Soon everything seemed dull: another sunrise, the lives of heroes, falling in love, war, the discoveries people made about each other. The only thing that didn't bore me, obviously enough, was how much money Tim Price made, and yet in its obviousness it did. There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being - flesh, blood, skin, hair - but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn't figure out why - I couldn't put my finger on it. — Bret Easton Ellis