Mental Construct Quotes & Sayings

Time itself is a creation of the restless mind; space has been created by the same mind to give itself room to wander when in fact there is no space beyond a mental construct that, like all constructs, eventually turns into a prison. — Alan W. Watts

By saying that phenomena are empty of intrinsic existence, we are declaring not their nonexistence but their interdependence, their absence of concrete reality. And the emptiness of phenomena, far from being a mental construct or a concept, corresponds to the reality itself of the phenomenal world. — Dalai Lama XIV

he wore his wealth with the comfortable indifference of someone born into it. New-made nobles, pretenders, and rich merchants simply don't carry themselves the same way. Alveron — Patrick Rothfuss

They don't want you until you have made a name, and by the time you have made a name, you have developed some kind of talent they can't use. All they will do is spoil it, if you let them. — Raymond Chandler

I don't understand computers. I've been unable to construct a working mental model of how they do what they do. I can break software by looking at it. I can blow anything up. Without trying. It's sort of like being a dowser. And this extreme elaborate clumsiness on my part is actually something people will pay me for. It's quite wonderful. — Brenda Laurel

Righteousness is easy in retrospect. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

A healthy self and an empty self are not contradictory; it just appears so because we use the same language to describe two different things. The whole path of meditation is about understanding that the self as an unchanging entity is a fiction, an illusory mental construct. — Joseph Goldstein

We cannot, even given our most imaginative efforts, construct a concept of Self that does not impute some causal influence of prior mental states on later ones. — Jerome Bruner

Something Vimes had learned as a young guard drifted up from memory. If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you're going to die. So they'll talk. They'll gloat.
They'll watch you squirm. They'll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar.
So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word. — Terry Pratchett

Optimists think badly, but live well. — Marty Rubin

In metaphysics, the notion that earth and all that's on it is a mental construct is the product of people who spend their lives inside rooms. It is an indoor philosophy. — Edward Abbey

Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music. Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct, not with the world we see. It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary experience. — Northrop Frye

Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease. Your whole sense of who you are is then derived from mind activity. Your identity, as it is no longer rooted in Being, becomes a vulnerable and ever-needy mental construct, which creates fear as the predominant underlying emotion. The one thing that truly matters is then missing from your life: awareness of your deeper self - your invisible and indestructible reality. — Eckhart Tolle

The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore. — Vincent Van Gogh

That's what makes death so hard
unsatisfied curiosity — Beryl Markham

To love others, that is, understand others, is, in reality, an affluent mental activity. We must, in order to reach it, add to the synthesis of our own psychological phenomena those of others and construct in our thought a larger synthesis than that of our own personality. These poor creatures cannot understand themselves. They have not strength enough completely to build up their own personality; therefore it is quite natural that they cannot assimilate that of others. Selfishness, in hystericals, is a result of mental weakness, of the diminution of all sympathetic emotions. — Anonymous

Most people confuse the "now" with what is happening to them in the now. Actually what is happening to you now has nothing to do with the present moment itself. If you were to suddenly die the present moment would remain. The problem occurs when we attach in our minds with what is happening to "us" presently. This is simply a mental construct that we have created ourselves. It is much like a grievance, either real or imagined. If we attach to grievances we are constantly inflicting suffering on ourselves, not the other party. — Stephen Weiss

Grown-ups love figures. When you talk to them about a new friend, they never ask questions about essential matters. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Christendom is not primarily a mental construct. It is above all a fact, indeed the longest historical experience the Church has had. Hence the deep impact it has made on its life and thought. — Gustavo Gutierrez

Either you believed in something or you didn't - you couldn't have it both ways and be honest with yourself. — Terry Brooks

Living in a diverse world - or leading a diverse work force - is more than a mental construct, a memorized list of cultural differences, or a willingness to be tolerant. It's about examining how well we function at the margins and interfaces of life, where divergent ways of being and believing meet and collide. (Kemper — Mark E. Mendenhall

They don't know who you are, Archer. They have no idea. And they don't deserve to know. Don't let their judgment hurt you. — Mia Sheridan

Anyone can win the Nobel Prize if the scientist works hard on his research subject. — Tim Hunt

Certain songs have been written years apart, but they have a natural continuity to my mind. — Elvis Costello

In fact, whenever energy is transmitted from one body to another in time, there must be a medium or substance in which the energy exists after it leaves one body and before it reaches the other ... and if we admit this medium as an hypothesis, I think it ought to occupy a prominent place in our investigations, and that we ought to endeavour to construct a mental representation of all the details of its action, and this has been my constant aim in this treatise. — James Clerk Maxwell

If people say the world we perceive is a 'construct' of our brains, they are saying in effect, that it results from an inveterate habit of thought. Why does it never occur to them that a habit is something you can overcome, if you set about it with enough energy? — Owen Barfield

Home is anywhere I hang my hair — Dolly Parton

Any human act that gives rise to something new is referred to as a creative act, regardless of whether what is created is a physical object or some mental or emotional construct that lives within the person who created it and is known only to him. — Lev S. Vygotsky

Monotheism and an absolute God define one another.

The absolute is a mental construct, an abstract mental model.
The absolute, whether it is a purest abstract essence or an extreme abstract measure, only exists in our minds as an abstraction.

Furthermore, the absolute will only lead to the abandon of all measure and blind us to the relative interdependence of all things.
The measure of knowledge of life is the knowledge of the measure of this relative interdependence. — Haroutioun Bochnakian

Whether or not science can be applied to that mental construct [i.e. the designed entity] is a matter of availability. If there is body of scientific knowledge that can be applied, then it would be foolish not to exploit it. However, if there is none, it does not mean that the thing cannot be designed, made, and used safely. — Henry Petroski

I have a personal definition of cartooning, which is, simply, "imaginative drawing." Anything you're drawing that is not in front of you but is a mental construct that you want to express in a drawing is, to me, a cartoon. — Jim Woodring

After a lifetime of soft, easy living in the West, one's buttocks take an awful hammering out here. Backpacking around India is just one long round of sitting on bone-hard, chafing, bruising and generally uncomfortable seats-whether in buses our trains, or restaurants or cinemas. There is no such thing as a padded seat in the whole country. — Frank Kusy

I hate having my photograph taken. — E.L. James