Mind Is Blank Quotes & Sayings

When I was twenty-three I began seeing a psychotherapist because I couldn't bear the idea that, after the end of an affair, all our shared memories might be expunged from the mind of the other, that they might no longer exist outside my own belief they'd happened. I couldn't accept the possibility of being the only one who would remember everything about those moments as carefully as I tried to remember them. My life, which exists mostly in the memories of the people I've known, is deteriorating at the rate of physiological decay. A color, a sensation, the way someone said a single word - soon it will all be gone. In a hundred and fifty years no one alive will ever have known me. Being forgotten like that, entering that great and ongoing blank, seems more like death than death. — Sarah Manguso

I feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all. — Anne Sexton

Always it is thus with my new students, and especially with the human ones; the mind is the last muscle they train or use, and the one that they regard the least. Ask them about swordplay and they can list every blow from a duel a month old, but ask them to solve a problem or make a coherent statement and ... well, I would be lucky to get more than a blank stare in return. — Christopher Paolini

If [t]he mind is a system with many parts, then an innate desire is just one component among others. Some faculties may endow us with greed or lust or malice, but others may endow us with sympathy, foresight, selfrespect, a desire for respect from others, and an ability to learn from our own experiences and those of our neighbors. These are physical circuits residing in the prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain, not occult powers of a poltergeist, and they have a genetic basis and an evolutionary history no less than the primal urges. It is only the Blank Slate and the Ghost in the Machine that make people think that drives are "biological" but that thinking and decision making are something else. — Steven Pinker

Because advertising and marketing is an art, the solution to each new problem or challenge should begin with a blank canvas and an open mind, not with the nervous borrowings of other people's mediocrities. That's precisely what 'trends' are - a search for something 'safe' - and why a reliance on them leads to oblivion. — George Lois

I never think of nothing. The closest I come to a blank mind is when I am counting, fucking, or drinking. The rest of the time, my thoughts are like a hamster on a wheel, running endlessly but getting nowhere. — Megan Hart

He's looking at me as if the whole world waits for my next breath, with an intensity that makes my heart pound and my palms sweat and then he smiles, a sweet curve of his mouth, and my breath catches, but then I freeze because there is something about it, something beyond it that I know, that makes my mind go blank with fear and pain. — Elizabeth Scott

Without memories to cloud it, the mind perceives with absolute clarity. Each observation stands out in stark relief. In the beginning, when there's not yet a smudge, the slate still blank, there is only the present moment: each vital detail, shocked color, the fall of light. Like film stills. The mind relentlessly open to the world, deeply impressed, even hurt by it: not yet gauzed by memory. — Nicole Krauss

When I swing at a golf ball right, my mind is blank and my body is loose as a goose. — Sam Snead

It's not words, so much, just my mind going blank and thoughts reaching up up up, me wishing I could climb through the ceiling and over the stars until I can find God, really see God, and know once and for all that everything I've believed my whole life is true, and real. Or, not even everything. Not even half. Just the part about someone or something bigger than us who doesn't lose track. I want to believe the stories, that there really is someone who would search the whole mountainside just to find that one lost thing that he loves, and bring it home. — Sara Zarr

Tell me what you make of Locke, then, and his difference with Descartes."
Vivian took the book from him and spread her small hand on the morocco leather binding. "Mr. Locke argues that the human mind is a blank tablet at birth... doesn't he?" She glanced at Morgan and received an encouraging nod. "And he claims that knowledge is founded in experience. Thought can only come after we learn through our senses. But I don't think I agree with him entirely. We are not born blank slates, are we? I think some things must exist in us at birth, before experience begins to work upon us. — Lisa Kleypas

The minute I sit down and think 'Okay, this must be KID SAFE!' my Muse develops Tourrette's and goes to lunch with Clive Barker, and my mind plunges into the gutter and I draw an appalling blank on anything that is not violent, gory, profanity laden, or depraved. So I think the only way I can ever do kid's books if I plan not to do kid's books. If that makes any sense. — Ursula Vernon

To live a good life: We have the potential for it. If we can learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference. This is how we learn: by looking at each thing, both the parts and the whole. Keeping in mind that none of them can dictate how we perceive it. They don't impose themselves on us. They hover before us, unmoving. It is we who generate the judgments - inscribing them on ourselves. And we don't have to. We could leave the page blank - and if a mark slips through, erase it instantly. Remember how brief is the attentiveness required. And then our lives will end. And why is it so hard when things go against you? If it's imposed by nature, accept it gladly and stop fighting it. And if not, work out what your own nature requires, and aim at that, even if it brings you no glory. None of us is forbidden to pursue our own good. — Marcus Aurelius

Because I'm not writing all the time (thank goodness), my mind is sometimes pleasantly blank. — Lydia Davis

My Eyes Are Open But I'm Hardly Looking In The Front ... Everything's Passing Me, Some Are Staring But My Eyes Are Blank, I'm Seeing But Not Seeing As My Mind Is Not Sending The Message To My Brains To Produce Images ... I'm Walking Alone Yet Full of People Around Me ... I'm Walking Forward ... There's No Feeling As I'm Numb ... Only Thing I Know, I Have To Finish My Ride Before My Time Expires ... So I'm Walking With Blank Emotion In My Eyes ...
(* Excerpt From My Novel "Eastern Promise") — Muhammad Imran Hasan

As a queen sits down, knowing that a chair will be there,
Or a general raises his hand and is given the field-glasses,
Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind.
Something will come to you. — Richard Wilbur

The tourist travels in his own atmosphere like a snail in his shell and stands, as it were, on his own perambulating doorstep to look at the continents of the world. But if you discard all this, and sally forth with a leisurely and blank mind, there is no knowing what may not happen to you. — Freya Stark

The void is a mouth crying to be filled, a blank mind aching for thought, a cavity desperate for shape. What is not implies what is. — Jack Vance

What happens to me when I'm provoked is that I get tongue-tied and my mind goes blank. Then I spend all night tossing and turning trying to figure out what I should have said — Nora Ephron

And once again I am I will not say alone, no, that's not like me, but, how shall I say, I don't know, restored to myself, no, I never left myself, free, yes, I don't know what that means but it's the word I mean to use, free to do what, to do nothing, to know, but what, the laws of the mind perhaps, of my mind, that for example water rises in proportion as it drowns you and that you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery. — Samuel Beckett

I use a computer, but before I begin each new book I keep a notebook. I write down everything that comes to mind during that period before I actually begin. It might take months or weeks. That notebook is my security blanket so that I never have to face a blank screen (or blank page). But I print out often and my best ideas usually come with a pencil in my hand. — Judy Blume

Let me run over the principal steps. We approached the case, you remember, with an absolutely blank mind, which is always an advantage. We had formed no theories. We were simply there to observe and to draw inferences from our observations. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Philosophers who have denied that there are any innate ideas probably meant only that all ideas were copies of our impressions. [W]hat is meant by 'innate'? If 'innate' is equivalent to 'natural', then all the perceptions and ideas of the mind must be granted to be innate or natural, in whatever sense we take the latter word, whether in opposition to what is uncommon, what is artificial, or what is miraculous. If innate means 'contemporary with our birth', the dispute seems to be frivolous - there is no point in enquiring when thinking begins, whether before, at, or after our birth. — David Hume

The worst part of being a driver is that you have hours to yourself while waiting for your employer. You can spend this time chitchatting and scratching your groin. You can read murder and rape magazines. You can develop the chauffeur's habit it's a kind of yoga, really of putting a finger in your nose and letting your mind go blank for hours (they should call it the "bored driver's asana"). — Aravind Adiga

Death always brings with it a kind of stupefaction, so difficult is it for the human mind to realize and resign itself to the blank and utter nothingness. — Gustave Flaubert

Her mind blank, she pulled a sheet of paper toward herself, then folded over a vertical strip. Sliding her nail along the edge to weaken it, she tore off a thin strip. Then another. The smooth actions helped order her thoughts. "No, it is not appropriate, but it might be all right. Why do you think you must nickname me? Is it to belittle me or to create a bond between us?" "I'm not sure which is the right answer," he replied. "To be honest, at first I expected you to be selfish and spoiled." "Such compliments will give me the vapors." Smoothing her strips of paper, she began pleating them into a little spring. If her hands trembled a little, he would not notice. — Theresa Romain

The empty mind - the pure mind - is not a blank, zero-land, where you're not feeling or caring about anything. It's an effulgence of the mind. It's a brightness that is truly sensitive and accepting. It's an ability to accept life as it is. When we accept life as it is, we can respond appropriately to the way we're experiencing it, rather than just reacting out of fear and aversion. — Ajahn Sumedho

I erupt from the dark, crushing tunnel into a flash of light and noise. A new kind of air surrounds me, dry and cold, as they wipe the last smears of home off my skin. I feel a sharp pain as they snip something, and suddenly I am less. I am no one but myself, tiny and feeble and utterly alone. I am lifted and swungthrough great heights across yawning distances, and given to Her. She wraps around me, so much bigger and softer than I ever imagined from inside,and I strain my eyes open. I see Her. She is immense, cosmic. She is the world. The world smiles down on me, and when She speaks it's the voice of God, vast and resonant with meaning, but words unknowable, ringing gibberish in my blank white mind. — Isaac Marion

When I was little, I was out riding my brand-new blue bicycle when I decided to see how far I could keep going without looking back even once.
I could feel with my back how my neighborhood was receding, further and further away ... but I kept pedaling with all my might, my mind almost going blank. All I could hear was the sound of my own heart, thumping wildly in my ears. Even now, I remember it sometimes. What exactly was I trying to do that day? What was it that I wanted to prove?
It's no good. My mind just keeps fogging over. I have this irritating sound stuck in my head. What is it? This sound ... Ohh ... I know what it is.
This is ... the sound of emptiness. — Chica Umino

I have stopped painting. I stand in front of the easel, brush in hand, but my mind is blank. It is as if I have been struck by a strange kind of blindness. — Linda Olsson

She could not go back now into the state which her mind had been in on that occasion. Everything was calmed and stilled, nay, chilled by this long interval. She could think of her Robert without the sinking of the heart - the sense of hopeless loneliness - which had moved her then. The wound had closed up: the blank, if it had not closed up, had acquired all the calmness of a long-recognized fact. She had made up her mind long since that the happiness which she could not then consent to part with, was over for her. That is the great secret of what is called resignation: to consent and agree that what you have been in the habit of calling happiness is done with; that you must be content to fill its place with something else, something less. Helen — Mrs. Oliphant

The mind of a baby is a tabula rasa; society writes information on his mind. — Debasish Mridha

You must squeeze out of yourself every sensation, every thought, every image, - mercilessly, without reserve and without remorse: you must search the darkest corners of your heart, the most remote recesses of your brain, - you must search them for the image, for the glamour, for the right expression. And you must do it sincerely, at any cost: you must do it so that at the end of your day's work you should feel exhausted, emptied of every sensation and every thought, with a blank mind and an aching heart, with the notion that there is nothing, - nothing left in you. — Joseph Conrad

There are some who believe that the mind is a blank tablet, on which experience is writ until the page be full, and the cryptic world is known; but I see rather that my own life hath been one long forgetting, the erasure of what was drawn, a terrible redaction; til all that remains is blank white and comfortless.
I know not what we have been; I know not what we are; but I know what we might be.
And so I light out for the unknown regions. — M T Anderson

Don't get seduced by your own stuff. Don't get high on your own supply. The hardest thing as a filmmaker is when you're watching a film that you've worked on for several years. You know every frame so intimately that holding lots of the objectivity of a new viewer who has just seen it for the first time is the hardest thing. Every aesthetic decision you make - and you make thousands of them every day, have to - in theory, must be done from you being a blank slate. You almost have to run a program, like a mind wipe, every time you watch the movie. — James Cameron

One must go for a film with an open mind; a film best impacts you when your mind is a blank page to the film. — Anurag Kashyap

She cannot remember her mother's face ... This is the woman who brought her into the world ... This is the woman her father loved. Yet every time she turns her mind's eye in her mother's direction she sees only the men she is talking to, the children she is playing with, the maids to whom she is giving orders ... She begins to realise how alike they are, she and her mother, these blank sheets on which men have written their stories, the white space between the words, making all their achievements possible and contributing nothing to the meaning. — Mark Haddon

It is not any crime you have committed that infects your soul with permanent guilt, it is none of your failures, errors or flaws, but the blank-out by which you attempt to evade them - it is not any sort of Original Sin or unknown prenatal deficiency, but the knowledge and fact of your basic default, of suspending your mind, of refusing to think. Fear and guilt are your chronic emotions, they are real and you do deserve them, but they don't come from the superficial reasons you invent to disguise their cause, not from your "selfishness," weakness or ignorance, but from a real and basic threat to your existence; fear, because you have abandoned your weapon of survival, guilt, because you know you have done it volitionally. — Ayn Rand

You can't come in."

Luna Morgan met her daughter's plaintive gaze with a blank one of her own. "What do you mean we can't come in?"

"I have a guest," Ivy said.

"Is he naked?" Max asked, wrinkling his nose.

"Who?"

"Your guest," Max said.

"It's not a man," Ivy said, rolling her eyes. "Get your mind out of the gutter. — Lily Harper Hart

Empiricism teaches that there is a real world of fixed things on the outside and that ideas of these outside things are stamped on the mind which is at the beginning of life a blank. — Holly Estil Cunningham

Never allow any unnecessary or vain thought to occupy your mind. This is more easily said than done. You cannot make your mind a blank all at once. So in the beginning try to prevent evil or idle thoughts by occupying your mind with the analysis of your own faults, or the contemplation of the Perfect Ones. — H. P. Blavatsky

Meditation is not a matter of trying to stop thinking or make your mind go blank but rather to realize when your attention is wandering and to simply let go of the thoughts and begin again. It is a way of changing our relationship to our thoughts, so we're not so consumed by them, with no sense of space. Having a newly spacious relationship to our thoughts brings both peace and freedom. — Sharon Salzberg

When some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania,
when you think, because Heaven has denied you this or that, on which you had set your heart, that all your life must be a blank,
oh, then diet yourself well on biography,
the biography of good and great men. See how little a space one sorrow really makes in life. See scarce a page, perhaps, given to some grief similar to your own, and how triumphantly the life sails on beyond it. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape. — Camille Paglia

Liberation

My mind is clouded,
I cannot hunt anymore.
I lay my gun over the tracks of the rabbit.

It was as though I became that creature
who could not decide
whether to flee or be still
and so was trapped in the pursuer's eyes-

And for the first time I knew
those eyes have to be blank
because it is impossible
to kill and question at the same time.

Then the shutter snapped,
the rabbit went free. He flew
through the empty forest

that part of me
that was the victim.
Only victims have a destiny.

And the hunter, who believed
whatever struggles
begs to be torn apart:

that part is paralyzed. — Louise Gluck

You can make anything into a play for the simple reason that the human mind is one of the best writers in the business. So, if you've got a writer who's clever enough to give you enough clues, you will fill out every blank spot in a play, every single one. — Morgan Freeman

How am I?"
[ ... ]
"Sometimes it's a rush, like skydiving and other times it's just a smooth ride, like floating in the middle of a calm lake. It's like standing next to a hot fire that's shooting sparks, or walking on the sun and then rolling in the snow. It's like plate tectonics and hailstorms and lighting and earthquakes and hurricane-force winds all happening at once but then everything suddenly stops moving and your mind draws a blank and everything's really peaceful. It's like your mind explodes and all that's left inside your body is heat. — Katie Kacvinsky

There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy. — George Eliot

It is the mind that tells you that the mind is there. Don't be deceived. All the endless arguments about the mind are produced by the mind itself, for its own protection, continuation and expansion. It is the blank refusal to consider the convolutions and convulsions of the mind that can take you beyond it. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

So, who is it?" Stella is persisting, somewhat suspiciously. "What's his name?"
But if I don't tell her the truth, what do I say? My mind draws a blank. I don't want to lie to her- "um ... " walking back to the bedroom, I notice the postcard Spike chose for me resting on my top of my dresser. I haven't written that one yet. Absently I pick it up and turn it over. On the back is written "Matthew Macfadyen as Fitzwilliam Darcy." "Fitzwilliam," I blurt. "No, what's his first name?" she asks. "That is his first name. — Alexandra Potter

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don't even know I'm working on. It's a free lunch. A free dinner. I don't know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing. — Charles Bukowski

The emptiness I speak about is not the emptiness the mind imagines. It is not blank. Your body can continue expressing in a natural way. Intelligence is there. Emotions can come. Everything can play, but inside there is total serenity and peace. No planning, no strategising, no personal identity is there. Just the space of pure being. It is what we are, but we dream and believe we are not. — Mooji

Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing the child's nobility to come into flower. Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved. — Steven Pinker

The state of mind of the photographer creating is a blank. I might add that this condition exists only at special times, namely when looking for pictures. -Something keeps him from falling off curbs, down open manholes, into bumpers of skidding trucks while in this condition but goes off duty at other times ... This is a very special kind of blank. A very active state of mind really, it is a very receptive state ... — Minor White

The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero. — Steven Pinker

Before the magisterial mess of Trevor Thomas's house, the orderly houses that most of us live in seem meagre and lifeless
as, in the same way, the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life. The house also stirred my imagination as a metaphor for the problem of writing. Each person who sits down to write faces not a blank page but his own overfilled mind. The problem is to clear out most of what is in it ... The goal is to make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that a reader will want to linger awhile among them, rather than to flee, as I wanted to flee from Thomas's house. — Janet Malcolm

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage
To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.
Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow. — Philip Larkin

At the end of the day, when the sun falls a willing prisoner of the night ... and humans, males and females alike, become submitted to the mistress of the dark, my mind begins to wander and wonder. Looking upwards at a blank slate of concrete, the psyque expresses freely what my subconscious is afraid to give free rein. And there and then, between the play of reality and dreamland, I find my place. I find myself. — Eiry Nieves

Dear God,
what is my purpose of life?
What should I do to find it?
Once I found it, will I become stronger?
... Oh no, my mind is blank.
a strange sound kept ringing in my head.
What sound is that ... ?
Ah, I know.
It's ...
The sound of emptiness. — Chica Umino

FEMALE VOICE: 'The truth is people are pushed around by two men who move all the bodies on earth into patterns that please them.'

MALE VOICE: 'I love my mind when it is fucking the cracks of events.'

MALE VOICE: 'What I give to all the people who do not want to live with me is arithmetic.'

FEMALE VOICE: 'Everyday, I do nothing important because I am scared blank and lazy. But then the men come. I put my mouth on them. I spit and write with the wet.'

MALE VOICE: 'I was not born live. This body grew but I did not feel cells split. — Jenny Holzer

Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper — Paul Erdos

Not even thinking about anything. My mind is a blank. We just want to enjoy the moment. — Andre Iguodala

There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in. — E.L. Doctorow

Our life is a blank book and we are the authors......... Write and shape your story as much as the mind can imagine it — Jason Calder

True science has no belief," says Dr. Fenwick, in Bulwer-Lytton 's Strange Story; "true science knows but three states of mind: denial, conviction, and the vast interval between the two, which is not belief, but the suspension of judgment." Such, perhaps, was true science in Dr. Fenwick's days. But the true science of our modern times proceeds otherwise; it either denies point-blank, without any preliminary investigation, or sits in the interim, between denial and conviction, and, dictionary in hand, invents new Graeco-Latin appellations for non-existing kinds of hysteria! — H. P. Blavatsky

The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk. — John Updike

My life is routine. I wake up early in the morning. I brush my teeth. I sit on the floor of the cell I do not go to breakfast. I stare at a gray cement wall. I keep my legs crossed my back straight my eyes forward. I take deep breaths in and out, in and out, and I try not to move. I sit for as long as I can I sit until everything hurts I sit until everything stops hurting I sit until I lose myself in the gray wall I sit until my mind becomes as blank as the gray wall. I sit and I stare and I breathe. I sit and I stare. I breathe. — James Frey

People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man like Paddy, with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such nonsense to pretend that those who have 'come down in the world' are to be pitied above all others.
The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start,
and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind. — George Orwell