Mental Limits Quotes & Sayings

When we are tired or preoccupied - what psychologists call 'resource-depleted' - we start to economise, to conserve those resources. Higher-order thinking is more expensive. So too is doubt, scepticism, arugment. 'Resource depletion specifically disables cognitive elaboration,' wrote Harvard psychologist Daniel Gillbert ... Because it takes less brain power to believe than to doublt, we are, when tired or distracted, gullible. Because we are all biased, and biases are quick and effortless, exhaustion tends to make us prefer the information we know and are comfortable with. We are too tired to do the heavier lifting of examining new or contradictory information, so we fall back on our biases the opinions and the people we already trust — Margaret Heffernan

Yoga is a generic name for any discipline by which one attempts to pass out of the limits of one's ordinary mental consciousness into a greater spiritual consciousness. — Sri Aurobindo

Federal law currently prohibits landlords from discriminating against prospective tenants who have had a felony conviction for drug use. Why? Because drug or alcohol abuse is considered a disability. According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD): "An individual with a disability is any person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities. The term physical or mental impairment may include, but is not limited to, conditions such as visual or hearing impairment, mobility impairment, HIV infection, mental retardation, drug addiction (except current illegal use of or addiction to drugs), or mental illness."[ii] — Brandon Turner

Nervous exhaustion from mental overwork is most often due to neglect of this rule and the brain worker should limit his regular day's work to a reasonable number of hours per day and those when the brain is at its best. — Maurice Bigelow

VII of Denmark, he became regent of Denmark when the king's life-long mental illness grew extreme enough to create a power vacuum. Struensee's dramatic social reforms included universal health care, limits on the totalitarian power of the Church, abolishing torture, removing censorship of the press, revoking privileges for nobles, — Frank Schaeffer

Insight is 'mental vision,' one of the ways in which the mind escapes the limits of the obvious or the familiar. — Jennifer James

In fact, ambitious tension actually limits our ability to succeed because it keeps us in a state of contraction emotionally and physically. It seems to give us energy but doesn't really. Like the white sugar of mental health, there's a short high followed by a crash. The cultivation of mental rest or surrender is like eating healthy food. It doesn't give us an immediate rush, but over time it provides a lot more energy. — Marianne Williamson

Liberate yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; for it is not given to every one to break through all limits,or,more expressively, not to every one is that a limit which is a limit for the rest. Consequently,do not tire yourself with toiling at the limits of others ... He who overturns one of his limits may have shown others the way and the means; the overturning of their limits remains their affair. — Max Stirner

As I accept the flowers, I release my grip on the balloons, and they bounce gently against the ceiling the way they did before - hovering, annoyed, frustrated, contained by the ceiling and disappointed by the limits of life. — Shannon Mullen

Beware of any work for God that causes or allows you to avoid concentrating on Him. A great number of Christian workers worship their work. The only concern of Christian workers should be their concentration on God. This will mean that all the other boundaries of life, whether they are mental, moral, or spiritual limits, are completely free with the freedom God gives His child; that is, a worshiping child, not a wayward one. A worker who lacks this serious controlling emphasis of concentration on God is apt to become overly burdened by his work. He is a slave to his own limits, having no freedom of his body, mind, or spirit. Consequently, he becomes burned out and defeated. There is no freedom and no delight in life at all. His nerves, mind, and heart are so overwhelmed that God's blessing cannot rest on him. — Oswald Chambers

Boundaries aren't all bad. That's why there are walls around mental institutions. — Peggy Noonan

If you meditate regularly, even when you don't feel like it, you will make great gains, for it will allow you to see how your thoughts impose limits on you. Your resistances to meditation are your mental prisons in miniature. — Ram Dass

What we each fall in love with individually is, I believe, our moral, mental, and physical complement. Not our like, not our counterpart; quite the contrary; within healthy limits, our unlike and our opposite. — Grant Allen

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited. — Sylvia Plath

Lady is the buddy of man, skilled with equivalent mental limit. — Mahatma Gandhi

People will focus on procedures and not notice anything that isn't just part of the procedures — Daniel Simons

The open ocean often takes you past your physical limits and when it does, sailing becomes a mental game. — Abby Sunderland

We pay attention to what we are told to attend to, or what we're looking for, or what we already know ... what we see is amazingly limited. — Daniel Simons

How we got to a place where men in skinny jeans rank higher in achievement and status than men in military-issued camouflage is a mental journey beyond the limits of my simple, sodden brain. — Greg Gutfeld

On a personal level, one of the main reasons I had wanted to cross Antarctica alone was to find out where my limits lay. If I failed because I had found those limits by being unable to continue for mental or physical reasons I would, at least, be returning home with some kind of answer. To fail because I had run out of time was a failure by logistics and as such, answered nothing. I would be left with the same question I had arrived with and that would be the bitter pill, the true failure. I couldn't imagine ever wanting to repeat this journey and so the question would likely always remain unanswered. This was my one and only opportunity and it would be wasted. — Felicity Aston

Humans do not have enough mental capacity to do all the things that we think we can do. As attentional load increases, attentional capacity gradually diminishes. — Margaret Heffernan

The BIG push means being able to develop and sustain momentum toward your goal; it is the process of actively replacing excuses with winning habits, the ultimate excuses blockers. Moreover, it is being willing to go to the wall for what you want or believe in, to push beyond your previous mental and physical limits, no matter what it takes. — Lorii Myers

The magnitude of Fort Peck in his telling of it gripped me the way the notion of a thirty-year winter had, and Zoe's magical presence in the back room, and the selection of the Medicine Lodge as the most pleasurable of all the saloons in the state, and family fame in newspapers far and wide, and Delano Roberston arriving in a cloud of sheep, the entire cascade of this one-of-a-kind year; the idea of outsize life, the feeling of being present as things happened way beyond ordinary in human experience. I suppose it was something like a mental fever, the headiest kind to have. Ever since Pop consolidated his thinking there in the hallway of the house, where my finger snap still echoed, my imagination and I knew no limits, and at twelve or at any other known age, there is no spell more dizzying. — Ivan Doig

She didn't realize she was in a prison until she collided with the bars. — Joyce Rachelle

Wherever something is wrong, something is too big. If the stars in the sky or the atoms of uranium disintegrate in spontaneous explosion, it is not because their substance has lost its balance. It is because matter has attempted to expand beyond the impassable barriers set to every accumulation. Their mass has become too big. If the human body becomes diseased, it is, as in cancer, because a cell, or a group of cells, has begun to outgrow its allotted narrow limits. And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutzdity, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because huma beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations, have been welded into overconcentrated social units such as mobs, unions, cartels, or great powers. — Leopold Kohr

The talker has found a hearer but not a listener; and though he may talk his very best for his own sake, you will find that his mental movements are erratic: they have no fixed centre and no definite object. His talk is like the water of a canal whose banks have given way, which rolls aimlessly hither and thither, without fulfilling any useful function, though it is the same water which was so helpful and serviceable, when it was confined within clearly marked limits by the restraining force of its earthy boundaries. — Charles Dickens

Endurance running was my passion , my ride. So here, I was in the driver's seat, running for two days straight pushing the mental and physical limits striving to be better, to go farther, to give more. — Dean Karnazes

Science does not give us absolute and final certainty. It only gives us assurance within the limits of our mental abilities and the prevailing state of scientific thought. — Ludwig Von Mises

More people than ever are being paid to think, instead of just doing routine tasks. Yet making complex decisions and solving new problems is difficult for any stretch of time because of some real biological limits on your brain. Surprisingly, one of the best ways to improve mental performance is to understand these limits. In act 1, Emily discovers why thinking requires so much energy, and develops new techniques for dealing with having too much to do. Paul learns about the space limits of his brain, and works out how to deal with information overload. Emily finds out why it's so hard to do two things at once, and rethinks how she organizes her work. Paul discovers why he is so easily distracted, and works on how to stay more focused. Then he finds out how to stay in his brain's "sweet spot." In the last scene, Emily discovers that her problem-solving techniques need improving, and learns how to have breakthroughs when she needs them most. — David Rock

I never set limits or created mental barriers. You may have read that I imagined my biceps as big as mountain peaks when I did my curling exercises. This visualization process was essential if I was to gain the kind of mass and size I needed to win the mr Olympia contest against monsters like Sergio Olivia and Lou ferrigno. — Arnold Schwarzenegger

When humans act like animals, they become the most dangerous of animals to themselves and other humans, and this is because of another critical difference between humans and animals: Whereas animals are usually restrained by the limits of physical appetites, humans have mental appetites that can be far more gross and capacious than physical ones. Only humans squander and hoard, murder and pillage because of notions. — Wendell Berry

Lack of leadership can have fearsome consequences. A dog's mental health, after all, depends to a large degree on leadership: dogs get enormously distressed when they think no one is in charge. Accordingly, it's not only nonsensical to fail to establish rules and limits with a dog ... but cruel. — Caroline Knapp

Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives. — George Lakoff

I love the fact that not many people can say 'Oh, I went out and ran 20 miles today.' I love how much dedication it takes and how much you learn a lot about yourself, your physical and mental limits. There's just something about it. — Shalane Flanagan

I [do not know] when the end of science will come ... What I do know is that our species is dumber than we normally admit to ourselves. This limit of our mental faculties, and not necessarily of science itself, ensures to me that we have only just begun to figure out the universe. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

When I walk off the field exhausted, drenched in sweat, knowing I pushed myself to the physical, mental, and emotional limits, there is no better feeling. — Joanna Lohman