Mental Map Quotes & Sayings

Picture the Bay of Bengal as an expanse of tropical water: still and blue in the calm of the January winter, or raging and turbid with silt at the peak of the summer rains. Picture it in two dimensions on a map, overlaid with a web of shipping channels and telegraph cables and inscribed with lines of distance. Now imagine the sea as a mental map: as a family tree of cousins, uncles, sisters, sons, connected by letters and journeys and stories. Think of it as a sea of debt, bound by advances and loans and obligations. Picture the Bay of Bengal even where it is absent - deep in the Malaysian jungle, where Hindu shrines sprout from the landscape as if washed up by the sea, left behind. — Sunil S. Amrith

We hold that man is never so near grace as when he begins to feel he can do nothing at all. — Charles Spurgeon

Taking care of the elderly comes without the vast literature of advice and encouragement that accompanies other kinds of commitments, notably romantic love and childbearing. It sneaks up on you as something that is not supposed to happen, or rather you crash into this condition that you have not been warned about, a rocky coast not on the map. In the preferred stories the last years of life are golden and the old all ripen into wisdom, not decay into diseases that mimic mental illness and roll backward into chaotic childhood and beyond. — Rebecca Solnit

Biblical worldview'. The term means literally a 'view of the world', a biblically informed perspective on all of reality. A worldview is like a mental map that tells you how to navigate the world effectively. It is the imprint of God's objective truth on our inner life. — Nancy Pearcey

I can't for the life of me not eat something that I want to eat. You know how if you turned on a faucet in your sink to wash your hands, the idea of leaving the bathroom without turning it off is insane? That's how I am about ignoring delicious food. — Mindy Kaling

The mechanical clock changed the way we saw ourselves. And like the map, it changed the way we thought. Once the clock had redefined time as a series of units of equal duration, our minds began to stress the methodical mental work of division and measurement. — Nicholas Carr

It's always more comforting to know that in any given corner of any room or any location you're on, you can make a photograph that you'll appreciate. — Herb Ritts

I am not a lovelorn little girl, constantly searching for her fairy story. — Heather Lyons

But I think my most lasting impression was still the unhurried dignity and noblesse with which the Spaniard handled his drink. He never gulped, panicked, pleaded with the barman, or let himself be shouted into the street. Drink, for him, was one of the natural privileges of living, rather than the temporary suicide it so often is for others. But then it was lightly taxed here, and there were no licensing laws; and under such conditions one could take one's time. — Laurie Lee

Deep practice feels a bit like exploring a dark and unfamiliar room. You start slowly, you bump into furniture, stop, think, and start again. Slowly, and a little painfully, you explore the space over and over, attending to errors, extending your reach into the room a bit farther each time, building a mental map until you can move through it quickly and intuitively. — Daniel Coyle

This no-land was exactly the place in which my self was pushed and started to float without points of reference, and at the same time to resist the forced choice of only one identity and the erosion of my plural cultural belonging. More then ever before, certainly more than at any other time of my geographical and cultural dislocation due to the experience of migration, I was convinced of the necessity to reinforce my pertinence not to the single reality, but to a multiplicity of spaces. As never before, I kept remembering irrationally the shape of my country still entire and unbroken, without the scars of the new borders drawn on a mainly historically incorrect 'ethnic basis'. My imagined country was visible only from the window of a plane flying over the Balkans, as only from the air are the new states' borders and walls of ethnic separation invisible. In my stubborn conviction I was keeping all the scattered pieces together as a mental map of my non-existent homeland. — Melita Richter Malabotta

We are akin to the inhabitants of a small isolated island who have just invented the first boat, and are about to set sail without a map or even a destination. Indeed, we are in a somewhat worse condition. The inhabitants of our imaginary island are at least aware that they occupy just a small space within a large and mysterious sea. We on the other hand fail to appreciate that we are living on a tiny island of consciousness within a perhaps limitless ocean of alien mental states. Just — Yuval Noah Harari

You do not exist in this world to get things done. You exist to glorify God by doing good to others. — Tim Challies

I made a mental note to write starlings in my "Southern Speak" notebook. I'd already started the second page, thanks to Faye and Bobbie. One corner of his mouth turned up in a smile. "I try. So, Churchville. Let me see the map."
I followed his directions, asking questions, until he drew a big circle around the funeral home. "That's it right there, just off 42. Or Buffalo Gap Highway. But you might not see any road signs. Out there things are a little...well, less posted. People just sort of know where they are. So look for these things." He drew in some more notes and--I'm not making this up--something like bugs with stick legs.
"What are those?" I asked, not intending to sound rude. "Roaches?"
"Those are cows. There's a pasture here."
"Oh. — Jennifer Rogers Spinola

The Kingdom of God might be at hand, but that hand was empty. — J.G. Ballard

The truth is that what fascinates me is not so much being in a place as not being there: how places live in the mind once you have left them, how they are imagined before you arrive, or how they are seemingly called out of nothing to illustrate a thought or story like my tree down yonder. These mental spaces map our Innes lives more fully than any "real" map, delineating the borders of here and there that also shape what we see in the present. — Siri Hustvedt

As part of an effort to prod college seniors to get tetanus shots, a group of students was given a lecture meant to educate them about the dangers of tetanus and the importance of getting inoculated against it. A large majority of those students reported that they were convinced and planned to get their shots, but in the end only 3 percent got them. Bu another group of students, who were presented with the same lecture, had a 28 percent inoculation rate. The difference? The second group was given a map of the campus and asked to plan their route to the health center and pick a date and time to go. Sometimes, you see, motivation isn't our problem. Rather, we need to identify life's everyday mental obstacles - regret, fatigue, overconfidence, fear, to name just four - and put ourselves into position to hurdle them. — Gary Belsky

Life did not take over the world by combat,
but by networking. — Lynn Margulis

Shopping malls rarely have any windows on the outside. There is a good reason for this: if you could see the world beyond the window you would be able to orientate yourself and might not get lost. Shopping malls have maps that are unreadable even to the most skilled cartographer. There is a good reason for this: if you could read the map you would be able to find your way to the shop you meant to go without getting lost. Shopping malls look rather the same whichever way you turn. There is a reason for this too: shopping malls are built to disorientate you, to spin you around, to free you from the original petty purpose for which you came and make you wander like Cain past rows and rows of shops thinking to yourself, "Ooh! I should actually go in there and get something. Might as well seeing as I'm here." And this strange mental process, this freeing of the mind from all sense of purpose or reason, is known to retail analysts as the Gruen transfer. — Mark Forsyth

Identity confusion... is as if somebody lost their mental road map and has no appreciation of who they are or what is going on in their life. They may know they know but become blustered or baffled as to why they don't. The information is inaccessible and likely would remind a person about things that have gone on in their life that are simply unacceptable and unknowable, in a given moment, because of the emotional gravity involved. — Richard A Chefetz

Mental illness

People assume you aren't sick
unless they see the sickness on your skin
like scars forming a map of all the ways you're hurting.

My heart is a prison of Have you tried?s
Have you tried exercising? Have you tried eating better?
Have you tried not being sad, not being sick?
Have you tried being more like me?
Have you tried shutting up?

Yes, I have tried. Yes, I am still trying,
and yes, I am still sick.

Sometimes monsters are invisible, and
sometimes demons attack you from the inside.
Just because you cannot see the claws and the teeth
does not mean they aren't ripping through me.
Pain does not need to be seen to be felt.

Telling me there is no problem
won't solve the problem.

This is not how miracles are born.
This is not how sickness works. — Emm Roy

...the mental probabilistic map in one's mind is so geared toward sensational that one would realize informational gains by dispensing with the news. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A mental image gives you a framework upon which to work. It is like the drawing of the architect, or the map of the explorer. Think over this for a few moments until you get the idea firmly fixed in your mind. — William Walker Atkinson

Recent breakthroughs in science show we have just the capacities we need to face our planet's challenges. We're "soft-wired" for cooperation, empathy, fairness, along with a deep need to "make a dent," as social philosopher Erich Fromm put it. My hunch is that one reason depression is a global pandemic is that the dominant mental map denies so many of us expression of these deep needs and capacities. — Frances Moore Lappe

I don't believe anyone is ugly. — Andrew Garfield

Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist. — Steven Pinker