Fragments Of Mind Quotes & Sayings

The fact that creative powers come from an area of the mind that seems to be independent of the conscious will, and often emerge with a good deal of emotional disturbance in their wake, provides the chief analogy between prophecy and the arts ... Some people pursue wholeness and integration, others get smashed up, and fragments are rescued from the smash of an intensity that the wholeness and integration people do not reach. — Northrop Frye

His mind floated in the amniotic fluid of memory, listening for echoes of the past. His father, meanwhile, had no idea that such a vivid scene was burned into Tengo's brain or that, like a cow in the meadow, Tengo was endlessly regurgitating fragments of the scene to chew on, a cud from which he obtained essential nutrients. Father and son: each was locked in a deep, dark embrace with his secrets. — Haruki Murakami

We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets - we remember only. — Henry Miller

At the outset do not be worried about this big question-Truth. It is a very simple matter if each one of you starts with the desire to get as much as possible. No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition. In this unsatisfied quest the attitude of mind, the desire, the thirst-a thirst that from the soul must arise!-the fervent longing, are the be-all and the end-all. — William Osler

In the drowsy dark cave of the mind dreams build their nest with fragments dropped from day's caravan. — Rabindranath Tagore

... it must be a complete harmonious whole that is attentive. That is attention. Does the mind attend with such complete attention to the activity of the monkey? - not condemning it, not saying 'This is right or wrong', just watching the tricks of the monkey. In this watching there is no analysis...The moment it analyses one of the fragments, the monkey is in operation. — Krishnamurti

If you try to follow the language of thought in your own mind, you will not find even the simplest sentences- only shreds, fragments of sentences, scattered as after an explosion, have greater effect on the reader than the same thoughts and images arranged in regular, steady, marching ranks? ... because you meet the reader's natural instinctive need. You do not compel him to skim — Yevgeny Zamyatin

When two individuals fall in love it is as if two fragments of the universal consciousness have remembered that they are one. — Bill Harvey

She had realized there are only fragments, that 'memories' always consist of fragments the mind puts together into a pattern, adapts a picture staked out early without the need for a conenction with anything that really happened. A great deal is misunderstood by small children, then stored as images that attract similar images, confirming and reinforcing. — Marianne Fredriksson

It is perhaps the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfectionraise up a stately and unaccusable whole. — John Ruskin

I have a magpie mind, by which I mean I see and hear little things - photos, fragments of conversation - and store them away for future use. — Laurie Graham

Distant singing is heard. Ghostly voices become audible: fragments of lectures remembered, the finely distilled wisdom and passion of seers and poets with which the modern young mind is tempered for the world that blows it to pieces. — Tennessee Williams

Science and mathematics Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it, They never touch it: consider what an explosion Would rock the bones of men into little white fragments and unsky the world If any mind for a moment touch truth. — Robinson Jeffers

Christ, how did you ever get this screwed up! his mind demanded of
him. He knew the answer, but even that was not a full explanation.
Different segments of the organism called John Terrance Kelly knew
different parts of the whole story,
but somehow they'd never all come together, leaving the separate
fragments of what had ... once been a tough, smart, decisive and to blunder
about in confusion - and despair! There was a happy thought. — Tom Clancy

Where the mind is without fear
and the head is held high,
where knowledge is free.
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls.
Where words come out from the depth of truth,
where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection.
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost it's way
into the dreary desert sand of dead habit.
Where the mind is led forward by thee
into ever widening thought and action.
In to that heaven of freedom, my father,
LET MY COUNTRY AWAKE! — Rabindranath Tagore

One great blemish in the popular mind of America and the prolific parent of an innumerable brood of evils, is Universal Distrust ... you no sooner set up an idol firmly, than you are sure to pull it down and dash it into fragments: and this because directly you reward a benefactor, or a public servant, you distrust him, merely because he is rewarded ... Any man who attains a high place among you, from the President downwards, may date his downfall from that moment. — Charles Dickens

Most of what I want simply slips away like water flowing through a net, and always what remains are only vague, elusive fragments of images ... that sink into countless strata in my mind. — Daido Moriyama

After a fairly shaky start to the day, Arthur's mind was beginning to reassemble itself from the shell-shocked fragments the previous day had left him with.
He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject's brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. — Douglas Adams

God always was, and always is, and always will be. Or rather, God always Is. For Was and Will be are fragments of our time, and of changeable nature, but He is Eternal Being. And this is the Name that He gives to Himself when giving the Oracle to Moses in the Mount. For in Himself He sums up and contains all Being, having neither beginning in the past nor end in the future; like some great Sea of Being, limitless and unbounded, transcending all conception of time and nature, only adumbrated [intimated] by the mind, and that very dimly and scantily. — Gregory Of Nazianzus

The collective intelligence of the humanity is the sole result of human inquiry. It is through reason and the exercise of a free mind that overcomes superstition, and if there be a better future for mankind, it will come through us, not through those who are clinging to the last fragments of a decaying system of belief — Al Stefanelli

If she possessed any memory whatsoever of the days when she'd been whole, her shattered recollections were scattered across the darkscape of her mind in fragments so minuscule that she could no more easily piece them together than she could gather from the beach all the tiny chips of broken seashells, worn to polished flakes by ages of relentless tides, and reassemble them into their original architectures. — Dean Koontz

Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter. Cold or warm. Tired or well-rested. Despised or honored. Dying ... or busy with other assignments. Because dying, too, is one of our assignments in life. There as well: "To do what needs doing." Look inward. Don't let the true nature of anything elude you. Before long, all existing things will be transformed, to rise like smoke (assuming all things become one), or be dispersed in fragments ... to move from one unselfish act to another with God in mind. Only there, delight and stillness ... when jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances, revert at once to yourself, and don't lose the rhythm more than you can help. You'll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep going back to it. — Marcus Aurelius

Mind is a crowd of many desires; it is not a single desire. Mind is multi-psychic, and all the fragments are falling apart in different directions. It is a miracle how we go on keeping ourselves together; it is a hard struggle to keep oneself together. Somehow we manage, but that togetherness remains only on the surface. Deep down there is turmoil. — Rajneesh

Humans have been in the grip of pain for eons, ever since they fell from the state of grace, entered the realm of time and mind, and lost awareness of Being. At that point, they started to perceive themselves as meaningless fragments in an alien universe, unconnected to the Source and to each other. — Eckhart Tolle

Each part of the mind sees only a little of what happens in some others, and that little is swiftly refined, reformulated and "represented." We like to believe that these fragments have meanings in themselves-apart from the great webs of structure from which they emerge-and indeed this illusion is valuable to us qua thinkers-but not to us as psychologists-because it leads us to think that expressible knowledge is the first thing to study. — Marvin Minsky

I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind's passage through the world, achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments. — Virginia Woolf

If [man] thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole. — David

There is a continuity of mind, as the Yogis call it. The mind is universal. Your mind, my mind, all these little minds, are fragments of that universal mind, little waves in the ocean; and — Swami Vivekananda

They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me; only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mind as consciousness lapsed, in the unspoken tongue, once, clearly, 'Arek!' Then no more. I held him, crouching there in the snow, while he died. They let me do that. Then they made me get up, and took me off one way and him another, I going to prison and he into the dark. — Ursula K. Le Guin

So long as the mind keeps silent in the motionless world of its hopes, everything is reflected and arranged in the unity of its nostalgia. But with its first move this world cracks and tumbles: an infinite number of shimmering fragments is offered to the understanding. We must despair of ever reconstructing the familiar, calm surface which would give us peace of heart. — Albert Camus

A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out. — Jaron Lanier

My mind stopped spinning as I was enveloped in waves of pleasure. Through half-open eyes, I saw fragments of the ancient room, the stone walls, the enormous wooden beams. I smelled history and ancient ground, war, and turmoil and worship. — Giselle Fox

Why are so many of their faces disfigured, if you don't mind me asking? Is it the explosive shells they're using over there?" "I'm told it's the machine guns. Curious soldiers will often lift their heads out of the trenches, thinking they can dodge bullets in time, but there's no way they can possibly avoid the hail of machine-gun fire." She glanced over her shoulder. "We tend to also see several missing left arms because of the way they position themselves for shooting in the trenches. Their bones shatter into tiny fragments and their wristwatches become embedded in their wounds. There's no way to save the limbs. — Cat Winters

The voice of the light remains ever so faint; images quiet as ancient constellations float across the domw of my dawning mind. They are indistinct fragments that never merge into a sensate picture.
There would be a landscape I have not seen before, unfamiliar melodic echoes, whisperings in a chaos of tongues. — Haruki Murakami

The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind. The whole random universe of the industrial age is breaking down into cryptic fragments. — William S. Burroughs

The speed limited my vision to the tunnel of the Toyota's headlights. The body could drive, I told myself, while the mind maintained. Maintained and stayed away from the weird peripheral window dressing of amphetamine and exhaustion, the spectral, luminous vegetation that grows out of the corners of the mind's eye along late-night highways. But the mind had its own ideas, and Kihn's opinion of what I was already thinking of as my "sighting" rattled endlessly through my head in a tight, lopsided orbit. Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage. Somehow this feedback-loop aggravated the diet pill, and the speed-vegetation along the road began to assume the colors of infrared satellite images, glowing shreds blown apart in the Toyota's slipstream. — William Gibson

And again. I kept clicking until the photograph was demolished, until it was no more than a mosaic of gray tiles, adding up to nothing.
Nothing. Because wasn't that how I felt that day? If you zoom close - if you really get close to someone, if you really get close to yourself - then you
lose the other person, you lose yourself entirely. You get so close you can't see anything anymore. Your mind becomes all these abstract fragments.
English becomes math. — David Levithan

If that condition of mind and soul, which we call inspiration, lasted long without intermission, no artist could survive it. The strings would break and the instrument be shattered into fragments. — Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Talk - half-talk, phrases that had no need to be finished, abstractions, Chinese bells played on with cotton-tipped sticks, mock orange blossoms painted on porcelain. The muffled, close, half-talk of soft-fleshed women. The men she had embraced, and the women, all washing against the resonance of my memory. Sound within sound, scene within scene, woman within woman - like acid revealing an invisible script. One woman within another eternally, in a far-reaching procession, shattering my mind into fragments, into quarter tones which no orchestral baton can ever make whole again. — Anais Nin

He thought of nothing. Some thoughts or fragments of thoughts, some images without order or coherence floated before his mind--faces of people he had seen in his childhood or met somewhere once, whom he would never have recalled, the belfry of the church at V., the billiard table in a restaurant and some officers playing billiards, the smell of cigars in some underground tobacco shop, a tavern room, a back staircase quite dark, all sloppy with dirty water and strewn with egg-shells, and the Sunday bells floating in from somewhere.... The images followed one another, whirling like a hurricane. Some of them he liked and tried to clutch at, but they faded and all the while there was an oppression within him, but it was not overwhelming, sometimes it was even pleasant.... The slight shivering still persisted, but that too was an almost pleasant sensation. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

To create a space for all our words, Drawing us to listen inward and outward. We seldom notice how each day is a holy place Where the eucharist of the ordinary happens, Transforming our broken fragments Into an eternal continuity that keeps us. Somewhere in us a dignity presides That is more gracious than the smallness That fuels us with fear and force, A dignity that trusts the form a day takes. So at the end of this day, we give thanks For being betrothed to the unknown And for the secret work Through which the mind of the day And wisdom of the soul become one. — John O'Donohue