Quotes & Sayings About Mind Of Matter

The mind is like a muddy road. Two ruts run down its center, from all the carts that have passed that way. no matter how many carts try to roll alongside the ruts, to stay out of the mud, sooner or later, a turn here or a jolt there will send them down into the ruts for good. Just so is the mind. As hard as we try to keep our thoughts out of the old ways, the old patterns, the old ruts, any little jog or jerk will send them right back down into the mud." -The Chronicler — Adam Gidwitz

in the universal womb that is boundless space
all forms of matter and energy occur
as flux of the four elements,
but all are empty forms, absent in reality:
all phenomena, arising in pure mind, are like that.

just as dream is a part of sleep,
unreal in its arising,
so all and everything is pure mind,
never separated from it,
and without substance or attribute.

experience is neither mind nor anything but mind;
it is a vivid display of emptiness, like magical illusion,
in the very moment inconceivable and unutterable.
all experience arising in the mind,
at its inception, know it as emptiness! — Longchenpa

If you want to sleep with me, I don't mind. I've never slept with anybody, and I'm very fond of you, so if you want to make love to me, I don't mind at all. But marrying me is a whole different matter. If you marry me, you
take on all my troubles, and they're a lot worse than you can imagine. — Haruki Murakami

Words are very powerful and can lead anyone reading them or hearing them, into contemplation and insight. How the mind follows suit is rarely palpable or expected. This impact is not a matter of metaphysical effects nor of an unexplainable phenomenon. It's simply part of being human. — David Mitchell

I wish I were a poet. I've never confessed that to anyone, and I'm confessing it to you, because you've given me reason to feel that I can trust you. I've spent my life observing the universe, mostly in my mind's eye. It's been a tremendously rewarding life, a wonderful life. I've been able to explore the origins of time and space with some of the great living thinkers. But I wish I were a poet.
Albert Einstein, a hero of mine, once wrote, 'Our situation is the following. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open.'
I'm sure I don't have to tell you that the vast majority of the universe is composed of dark matter. The fragile balance depends on things we'll never be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Life itself depends on them. What's real? What isn't real? Maybe those aren't the right questions to be asking. What does life depend on?
I wish I had made things for life to depend on. — Jonathan Safran Foer

The Taliban should keep it in mind that one of us has to die one day. And if I die early, it does not matter. I will continue my campaign and I'm going back to Pakistan as soon as possible. And I want to be a politician. And, through politics, I am going to serve my mission, and I'm going to work for education for every child. — Malala Yousafzai

Revelation in matters where reason cannot judge, or but probably, ought to be hearkened to. First, Whatever proposition is revealed, of whose truth our mind, by its natural faculties and notions, cannot judge, that is purely matter of faith, and above reason. — John Locke

But what, after all, is faith? It is a state of mind that leads people to believe something - it doesn't matter what - in the total absence of supporting evidence. If there were good supporting evidence then faith would be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it anyway. It is this that makes the often-parroted claim that 'evolution itself is a matter of faith' so silly. People believe in evolution not because they arbitrarily want to believe it but because of overwhelming, publicly available evidence. — Richard Dawkins

After seeing amazing magical places like Neverland, Oz, Narnia and Wonderland, why did you ever want to leave?"
The girls looked to one another; they had never been asked the question before, at least in Alex's mind.
"Because no matter where you go or what you see, you'll always want to be where you belong," Lucy said.
"Your home is where you feel most comfortable and loved," Wendy said.
"It's a part of you," Alice added. "It's where your family is."
"There's no place like home," Dorothy said, as if it was the first time she'd ever said those words.
Alex appreciated what they had to say, but wasn't sure if she entirely agreed. "I wonder, though, if home sometimes isn't where you're from," she said.
The girls looked at her as if she had already answered her own question. Alex wondered if that had been the real question lingering in her mind all along. — Chris Colfer

Having made his clerical toilet with due care in the morning, he was prepared only for those amenities of life which were suited to the well-adjusted stiff cravat of the period, and to a mind weighted with unpublished matter. — George Eliot

You can only be funny if you have matters of great importance on your mind. — Kurt Vonnegut

No matter what you accumulate from outside, or what your mind forms inside, it all comes down to the choice you make out of everything that is stored in your mind. — Roshan Sharma

Why is the mind incapable of deciding its own subject matter? Why when we desperately want to think of one thing to we invariably think of another? — Jeanette Winterson

The word treatment is usually applied to a prayer that is made for some specific purpose, as distinct from a general prayer, which is really a visit with God. You must remember that a treatment is a definite practical action, having a definite object and a definite beginning and end. It is in fact a surgical operation on the soul. Let us suppose that you decide to heal a certain difficulty by prayer. You know that your difficulty must be caused by some negative thought charged with fear and located in the subconscious mind. You therefore turn to God, and remind yourself of His goodness, His limitless power, and His care for you. As you work the fear will begin to dissolve, and the awareness of the Truth corrects the erroneous beliefs themselves. Thank God for the healing that you believe will come - and then you keep your thought off the matter until you feel led, after an interval, to treat again. He sent his word, and healed them ... (Psalm 107:20). — Emmet Fox

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue. — Henri Matisse

You never would get through to the end of being a father, no matter where you stored your mind or how many steps in the series you followed. Nit even if you died. Alive or dead a thousand miles distant, you were always going to be on the hook for work that was neither a procedure nor a series of steps but, rather, something that demanded your full, constant attention without necessarily calling you to do, perform, or say anything at all. — Michael Chabon

I see the stars in the sky, and they make me think of life. Of the many plans dwelling inside my mind, but how few memories I have. No matter how hard I try, I can't choose which memories I want to keep or which I can forget. So I've been wondering what's the purpose of creating memories if I can't just keep them all? — J.C. Reed

Yet a part of you still believes you can fight and survive no matter what your mind knows. It's not so strange. Where there's still life, there's still hope. What happens is up to God. — Louis Zamperini

A Mother's Advice

Manners matter, regardless of your position in society. There is no excuse in this world to practice bad manners, especially at the table. I found that out in high school. I was invited to my boyfriend's house for dinner. His parents were somewhat formal, and I knew the dinner would be "fancy," at least in my mind. My family wasn't upper class (or even middle class), and my mother never had what would be called "social graces."
Before I left, my mother gave me a piece of advice: hold your head high, be quiet, and take the lead from his mother. Even though I was scared to death, I did what my mother advised and got through the experience with flying colors.
To this day, my mother's advice has gotten me through many difficult situations, especially ones that are totally new to me! With my mother's simple advice, I know I could dine with the Queen of England, just by following her lead. Thanks, Mother!

-Deborah Ford — Deborah Ford

The most ernest prayer that I know is to ask for the life energy of the universe to come down into my body and let my mind become full and overflowing with peace and gratitude. Meditation is earnest prayer, and when prayer progress, it becomes true meditation.
No matter what prayer you offer, or from where, the key to prayer is sincerity. It isn't a certain posture that's important, but whatever you do, the important thing is not to lose the feeling of sincere devotion and earnestness. — Ilchi Lee

Like the enotmologist in search of colorful butterflies, my attention has chased in the gardens of the grey matter cells with delicate and elegant shapes, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind. — Santiago Ramon Y Cajal

Mom, how do you know if the guy is the guy?"
You mean if he'll be a good husband?" She pauses, then says "The ticket is for the man to love the woman more than she loves him."
Shouldn't it be equal?"
Mom cackles. "It can never be equal."
But what if the woman loves the man more?"
A life of hell awaits her. As women, the deck is stacked against us because time is our enemy. We age, while men season. And trust me, there are plenty of women out there looking for a man, and they don't mind staking a claim on somebody else's husband, no matter how old, creaky, and deaf they are. — Adriana Trigiani

Greet everyone you meet with a warm smile. No matter how busy you are, don't rush encounters with coworkers, family, and friends. Speak softly. Listen attentively. Act as if every conversation you have is the most important thing on your mind today. Look your children and your partner in the eyes when they talk to you. Stroke the cat, caress the dog. Lavish love on every living being you meet. See how different you feel at the end of the day ... — Sarah Ban Breathnach

Someone once inquired of a Far Eastern Zen master, who had a great serenity and peace about him no matter what pressures he faced, "How do you maintain that serenity and peace?" He replied, "I never leave my place of meditation." He meditated early in the morning and for the rest of the day, he carried the peace of those moments with him in his mind and heart. — Stephen Covey

It was the King Color, of which all the lesser colors are merely partial and wishy-washy reflections. It was octarine, the color of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself. — Terry Pratchett

Consciousness is not mind; it is the ground of all being, the ground of both matter and mind. Matter and mind are both possibilities of consciousness. — Amit Goswami

Remember, we are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we're so deeply inner connected with one another. Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is the supreme creative act. — Ram Dass

It was during the Renaissance that creativity was first seen, not as a matter of divine inspiration, but as a gift of a great learned man to imitate God's ability to create. As Prometheus stole the fire of the Gods and brought it to the mankind, humanity needed to steal the secret of 'creation' from Gods and understand its essence. — Natasa Nuit Pantovic

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. — John B. S. Haldane

Today, when people say they cannot believe, it is not a mental problem; it is a matter of the will of the heart- they do not want to believe. Some say they have certain 'mental reservations,' mental hurdles which they cannot get over. My friend, your mind is not big enough to take even one little hurdle. The problem is never in the mind but in the will. There is sin in the life, and a man does not want to turn to God; he does not want to believe Him. — J. Vernon McGee

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc. — Franz Kafka

So a deeper look at which verbs participate in the locative alternation has forced us to take a deeper look at what compels the mind to construe physical events in certain ways. And at that depth we have discovered a new layer of concepts that the mind uses to organize mundane experience: concepts about substance, space, time, and force. These concepts encourage the mind to unite events that have nothing in common in terms of what they look like, smell like, or feel like, yet they obviously matter to the mind a great deal. They are so pervasive that some philosophers consider them to be the very scaffolding that organizes mental life, and in chapter 4 I will show how they saturate our science, our storytelling, our morals, our law, even our humor. — Steven Pinker

One new indulgence was to go out evenings alone. This I worked out carefully in my mind, as not only a right but a duty. Why should a woman be deprived of her only free time, the time allotted to recreation? Why must she be dependent on some man, and thus forced to please him if she wished to go anywhere at night?
A stalwart man once sharply contested my claim to this freedom to go alone. "Any true man," he said with fervor, "is always ready to go with a woman at night. He is her natural protector." "Against what?" I inquired. As a matter of fact, the thing a woman is most afraid to meet on a dark street is her natural protector. Singular — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Since you've come all the way over here to tell me, I have a distinct feeling it doesn't matter if I do or not. Anyway, go right ahead. Add a prelude, if you'd like. And a 'Dance of the Blessed Spirits.' I don't mind. — Haruki Murakami

The sole "property" of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside the mind. — Vladimir Lenin

No. Depression is the unseen, unheard, silent killer. It is the pain that is too much to cope with, too hard to deal with and never understood. It is something that you can't escape, no matter how hard you try it ALWAYS swallows you again. It constantly follows you around, like black smoke choking you from the inside out. Like a lion clawing at your heart and mind, eating pieces of you until there is nothing left. — Astrid Lee Miles

Reports in matters of this world are many, and our resources of mind for the discrimination of them very insufficient — John Newman

No matter your position, circumstances, or opportunities in life, you always have the freedom of mind to choose how you experience, interpret, and, ultimately, shape your world. — Brendon Burchard

The romantics would call this a love story, the cynics would call it a tragedy. In my mind it's a little bit of both, and no matter how you choose to view it in the end, it does not change the fact that it involves a great deal of my life and the path I've chosen to follow. — Nicholas Sparks

What were we like then in that time and space, unburdened of the weight of outer sound? We were angels harboring each other in the notion of desirelessness, dazed in our acquiescence to the drift through subatomic matter. The love of minds should last beyond lives. Maybe it does, each mind a dice-toss of neutron stars, invisible except to theory, pulling at cold space to find its lover. — Don DeLillo

The problem with the religious solution [for mysteries such as consciousness and moral judgments] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, "Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing." For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his window. — Steven Pinker

Make up your mind to this. If you are different, you are isolated, not only from people of your own age but from those of your parents' generation and from your children's generation too. They'll never understand you and they'll be shocked no matter what you do. But your grandparents would probably be proud of you and say: 'Theres a chip off the old block,' and your grandchildren will sigh enviously and say: 'What an old rip Grandma must have been!' and they'll try to be like you. — Margaret Mitchell

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

My mind's sunk so low, Claudia, because of you, wrecked itself on your account so bad already, that I couldn't like you if you were the best of women, -or stop loving you, no matter what you do. — Catullus

Art can model the more difficult dynamic of transfiguring one's life, but at some point the dynamic reverses itself: life models, or forces, the existential crisis by which art - great art - is fully experienced. There is a fluidity between art and life, then, in the same way that there is, in the best lives, a fluidity between mind and matter, self and soul, life and death. Experience seems to stream clearly through some lives, rather than getting slowed and clogged up in the drift-waste of ego, or stagnating in little inlets of despair, envy, rage. It has to do with seizing and releasing as a single gesture. It has to do with standing in relation to life and death ... owning an emptiness that, because you have claimed it, has become a source of light, wearing your wound that, like a ramshackle house on some high exposed hill, sings with the hard wind that is steadily destroying it. — Christian Wiman

Every dish in the ferial cuisine, however, provides a double or treble delight: Not only is the body nourished and the palate pleased, the mind is intrigued by the triumph of ingenuity over scarcity - by the making of slight materials into a considerable matter. A man can do worse than to be poor. He can miss altogether the sight of the greatness of small things. — Robert Farrar Capon

But. All I could focus on was that one word: Why was there always a but? My parents swore up and down that they would love me no matter what, and yet the but sent me sliding down a rabbit hole, appearing in my mind like miles of quicksand before I could get to the love they were promising. - Kate Fagan. — Gregory Montoya

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice - and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man - by choice; he has to hold his life as a value - by choice; he has to learn to sustain it - by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues - by choice.
A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality. — Ayn Rand

You are here to leave something! You are here to make a point! It is your responsibility to find the point you have to mind or you shall always mind the point others are hitting or missing at the expense of your own point! When you know the point to hit, mind the point and don't miss the point, and no matter how many times you try and fail, let the point be your point and keep hitting! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I owe it all to words and art, the peace that came with a flicker of a pen silenced the suffering; eased the pain and life that was once filled with burden became sane again. It Became meaningful.
Art does matter, it made me, when the world changed me. — Nikki Rowe

In particular, if consciousness is an ontological fundamental-that is, a primary element of reality-then it may have the power to achieve what is both the best-documented and at the same time the spookiest effect of the m ind on the material world: the ability of consciousness to transform the infinite possibilities for, say, the position of a subatomic particle as described by quantum mechanics into the single reality for that position as detected by an observer. If that sounds both mysterious and spooky, it is a spookiness that has been a part of science since almost the beginning of the twentieth century. It was physics that first felt the breath of this ghost, with the discoveries of quantum mechanics, and it is in the field of neuroscience and the problem of mind and matter that its ethereal presence is felt most markedly today. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

Age is a question of mind over matter. If you do not mind, it does not matter. — Preeti Shenoy

You have got to have a concept of the volume around here."

"Was the dream wishful thinking, or could Spirit be indestructible, like the conservation of matter, hidden from the conscious mind but perceived by the unconscious? — Phil Arnold

Happiness and achieving our dreams is a matter of believing it is possible and having a positive frame of mind. — Rob Martin

And when you talk about realization, accomplishment for that matter enlightenment is that when you realize the fundamental essence of your mind. — Sogyal Rinpoche

Never true,' Old Ben would say. 'Useful- now, there's something. Your mind might make a connection that is useful. But true is another matter. True implies that you have found a connection that exists independent of your apprehension of it, that would exist whether you noticed it or not. And I must say that I have never seen such a connection in my life. There are times when I suspect there are no such connections, that all links, bonds, ties, and similarities are creations of thought and have no substance. — Orson Scott Card

The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter and a scarcity of words; for whosoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the choice of both. — Jonathan Swift

[How does it happen that this man, so distressed at the death of his wife and his only son, or who has some great lawsuit which annoys him, is not at this moment sad, and that he seems so free from all painful and disquieting thoughts? We need not wonder; for a ball has been served him, and he must return it to his companion. He is occupied in catching it in its fall from the roof, to win a game. How can he think of his own affairs, pray, when he has this other matter in hand? Here is a care worthy of occupying this great soul, and taking away from him every other thought of the mind. This man, born to know the universe, to judge all causes, to govern a whole state, is altogether occupied and taken up with the business of catching a hare. — Blaise Pascal

I create other worlds, magical never-never lands where the camera is my weapon and the battles I fight are with the elements. i stretch the laws of the mind and displace people from their realities to capture a side of them they didn't even know they had. Photography has the ability to freeze people in this time and space - no matter what happens after that moment, it cannot change - they are exactly how i want them to be. — Tyler Shields

So beware. For good or ill, a mature, enthusiastic delight is extremely contagious. This is where's God's Word cuts to the heart of the matter. Foolish companions will induce one another to try out and ultimately to 'study' foolish delights. Skateboarding and computer games come to mind. So do drugs and alcohol. — Gregg Harris

Karma literally means "deed" or "act" and more broadly names the universal principle of cause and effect, action and reaction which governs all life. Karma is a natural law of the mind, just as gravity is a law of matter. — Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami

Meditation means a state of unconditioned mind. Meditation is the process of undoing the harm that every society goes on doing to every individual - communist or Catholic, Jaina or Jew, it does not matter. I am not talking about any particular conditioning that is wrong; I am saying conditioning AS SUCH is wrong. — Rajneesh

Being in love is a very strange thing. Your thoughts constantly drift towards this other person, no matter what you're doing. You could be reaching for a glass in the cupboard or brushing your teeth or listening to someone tell a story, and your mind will just start drifting towards their face, their hair, the way they smell, wondering what they'll wear, and what they'll say the next time they see you. And on top of the constant dream state you're in, your stomach feels like it's connected to a bungee cord, and it bounces and bounces around for hours until it finally lodges itself next to your heart. — Pittacus Lore

Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a by-product, something the reader himself is led to formulate after watching the story unfold. The ideas, the generalizations, ought to be implicit in the selection and arrangement of the people and places and actions. They ought to haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark. — Wallace Stegner

What is faith? Is it to believe that which is evident? No. It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason. — Voltaire

To my mind, a well-developed sense of humor is the surest indication of a person's humanity, no matter how black and bitter that humor may be. — Thomas Ligotti

Mind is locked in matter like the spirit Ariel in a cloven pine. Like Ariel, men struggle to escape the drag of the matter they inhabit, yet it is the spirit that they fear. — Loren Eiseley

I learned a lot that night - like how incredibly mind blowing ho-hos and wine coolers were together, how that you could discover the answers to life's most difficult questions by watching Buffy, but most of all, that no matter what was going on in life - a best friend could make it all seem bearable. — Peggy Martinez

No matter is too complex for the healing impact of divine mind. Divine mind arranges everything to its highest order. What lies within you knows how to act and when to act. Tuned to divine mind, you have an unshakable inner clarity that makes proper and appropriate choices. Your good is assured. — Julia Cameron

I should be inclined, therefore, as I have hinted before, to consider the world and this life as the mighty process of God, not for the trial, but for the creation and formation of mind, a process necessary to awaken inert, chaotic matter into spirit, to sublimate the dust of the earth into soul, to elicit an ethereal spark from the clod of clay. And in this view of the subject, the various impressions and excitements which man receives through life may be considered as the forming hand of his Creator, acting by general laws, and awakening his sluggish existence, by the animating touches of the Divinity, into a capacity of superior enjoyment. The original sin of man is the torpor and corruption of the chaotic matter in which he may be said to be born. — Thomas Robert Malthus

The student should bear in mind that the very essence of consciousness is constantly to identify itself with the Not-Self, and as constantly to re-assert itself by rejecting the Not-Self. Consciousness, in fact, consists of this alternating assertion and negation - "I am this" - "I am not this." Hence consciousness is, and causes in matter, the attracting and repelling that we call a vibration. — Arthur E. Powell

She pushed the revelation about Dr. Kruger into a side pocket of her mind, to be examined more thoroughly another time. Who would ever have suspected that he was shy? That any grownups were, for that matter, and especially a person as important as a doctor? — Beverly Butler

Beethoven was just music, and it didn't matter if he could hear it or not - he could feel it. He could hear it in his mind. He could write it down hearing it in his mind. He was just music. Yeah, he's one of my favorite writers of all times. — Smokey Robinson

In his own mind, it was never a matter of courage. But courage it was. — Carl Hiaasen

Quietly, like a night bird, floating, soaring, wingless. We glide from shore to shore, curving and falling but not quite touching; Earth: a distant memory seen in an instant of repose, crescent shaped, ethereal, beautiful, I wonder which part is home, but I know it doesn't matter ... the bond is there in my mind and memory; Earth: a small, bubbly balloon hanging delicately in the nothingness of space. — Alfred Worden

'SuperBetter' is fundamentally about a mind shift. It's about claiming your power to be in charge of how you spend your time and energy, and focusing it on the things that matter the most to you. Focusing on things that will bring real happiness, real well-being. — Jane McGonigal

When that slow-motion, silent explosion of love takes place in me, unfolding its melting fringes and overwhelming me with the sense of something much vaster, much more enduring and powerful than the accumulation of matter or energy in any imaginable cosmos, then my mind cannot but pinch itself to see if it is really awake. I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe, just as a man in a dream tries to condone the absurdity of his position by making sure he is dreaming. I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence. — Vladimir Nabokov

No matter what night preceded it, she had never known a morning when she did not feel the rise of a quiet excitement that became a tightening energy in her body and a hunger for action in her mind - because this was the beginning of day and it was a day of her life. — Ayn Rand

Our desire to segregate the mind's cogitations from the body's exertions reflects the grip that Cartesian dualism still holds on us. When we think about thinking, we're quick to locate our mind, and hence our self, in the gray matter inside our skull and to see the rest of the body as a mechanical life-support system that keeps the neural circuits charged. More than a fancy of philosophers like Descartes and his predecessor Plato, this dualistic view of mind and body as operating in isolation from each other appears to be a side effect of consciousness itself. Even though the bulk of the mind's work goes on behind the scenes, in the shadows of the unconscious, we're aware only of the small but brightly lit window that the conscious mind opens for us. And our conscious mind tells us, insistently, that it's separate from the body. — Nicholas Carr

What is man? ... What a strange union of matter and mind! A machine for converting material into spiritual force. — Benjamin Peirce

Is the world divided into mind and matter, and, if so, what is mind, what is matter? Is mind subject to matter, or is it possessed of independent powers? Has the universe any unity or purpose? Is it evolving towards some goal? Are there really laws of nature, or do we believe in them only because of our innate love of order? Is man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water impotently crawling on a small and unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is there a way of living that is noble and another that is base, or are all ways of living merely futile? ... To such questions no answers can be found in the laboratory.'23 — John C. Lennox

Several elements of the ADD mind favor creativity ... As mentioned earlier, the term 'attention deficit' is a misnomer. It is a matter of attention inconsistency. While it is true that the ADD mind wanders when not engaged, it is also the case that the ADD mind fastens on to its subject fiercely when it is engaged. A child with ADD may sit for hours meticulously putting together a model airplane. — Edward Hallowell

Skill teachers are made scarce by the belief in the value of
licenses. Certification constitutes a form of market manipulation and is plausible only to a schooled mind.
Most teachers of arts and trades are less skillful, less inventive, and less communicative than the best craftsmen
and tradesmen. Most high-school teachers of Spanish or French do not speak the language as correctly as their
pupils might after half a year of competent drills. Experimentsconducted by Angel Quintero in Puerto Rico
suggest that many young teen-agers, if given the proper incentives, programs, and access to tools, are better than
most schoolteachers at introducing their peers to the scientific exploration of plants, stars, and matter, and to the
discovery of how and why a motor or a radio functions. — Ivan Illich

The truth of the matter was something much more subtle and tremendous than any plain physical miracle could ever be. But never mind that. The important thing was that, when I did see the stars (riotously darting in all directions according to the caprice of their own wild natures, yet in every movement confirming the law), the whole tangled horror that had tormented me finally presented itself to me in its truth and beautiful shape. And I knew that the first, blind stage of my childhood had ended. — Olaf Stapledon

In behaviorism, an infant's talents and abilities didn't matter because there was no such thing as a talent or an ability. Watson had banned them from psychology, together with other contents of the mind, such as ideas, beliefs, desires, and feelings. They were subjective and unmeasurable, he said, and unfit for science, which studies only objective and measurable things. To a behaviorist, the only legitimate topic for psychology is overt behavior and how it is controlled by the present and past environment. (There is an old joke in psychology: What does a behaviorist say after making love? "It was good for you; how was it for me?") — Steven Pinker

I loved her. I did not know what state of mind I would be in when I got where I was going and I was most worried that in the process I might forget her. I did not ever want to forget her! I held the image of her in my mind so strongly and the eternal love for her so deep within my heart that it could never ever be erased, no matter what. My love for her was stronger than anything that could happen to me. — Kate McGahan

Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things. But what dies is the form. The matter is immortal. — John Fowles

There are three states of matter but what state one is in that matters. — Amit Abraham

The real danger is found in Humanity's refusal to move beyond the trap of instinct and into the intellectual mind. The refusal to accept our health and the health of every other living thing on this planet must always come before profit. Whether it's the oil companies, pharmaceutical companies; or anyone else; we are not Gods no matter how much the New Agers like to proclaim it. In that path lies the rubble of the enemy of life, his Fallen God Bombers and his murderous dark medics. Out of that emanates the force of fear; fear of judgement, fear of difference and fear the other will bring you pain. — Cole J. Davis

It has always seemed to me extreme presumptuousness on the part of those who want to make human ability the measure of what nature can and knows how to do, since, when one comes down to it, there is not one effect in nature, no matter how small, that even the most speculative minds can fully understand. — Galileo Galilei

The art of reading, it occupies your mind no matter at any situation or mood you're in..bringing you to completely different world, the enchanting world of the characters..giving you the best feeling after reading it..the art of writing, it shows who you are, what are your real passions, what you've been through..inviting other people to see and experience your own world..hoping they have the best feeling that you have when writing it. As much as the feeling you always have when you read the books you've read before.. — Asrie Budiasriati

At this point in my life, beaming confidence is largely a matter of mind over bladder control — Josh Stern

Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind's equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They'll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished or self-destructive. — Barry Eisler

Remember this, son, if you forget everything else. A poet is a musician who can't sing. Words have to find a man's mind before they can touch his heart, and some men's minds are woeful small targets. Music touches their hearts directly no matter how small or stubborn the mind of the man who listens. — Patrick Rothfuss

The birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse. — Terry Tempest Williams

The minds of the preoccupied, as if harnessed in a yoke, cannot turn round and look behind them. So their lives vanish into an abyss; and just as it is no use pouring any amount of liquid into a container without a bottom to catch and hold it, so it does not matter how much time we are given if there is nowhere for it to settle; it escapes through the cracks and holes of the mind. — Seneca.

There is no matter as such - mind is the matrix of all matter. — Max Planck

By exerting its will, Descartes declared, the immaterial human mind could cause the material human machine to move. This bears repeating, for it is an idea that, more than any other, has thrown a stumbling block across the path of philosophers who have attempted to argue that the mind is immaterial: for how could something immaterial act efficaciously on something as fully tangible as a body? Immaterial mental substance is so ontologically different-that is, such a different sort of thing-from the body it affects that getting the twain to meet has been exceedingly difficult. To be sure, Descartes tried. He argued that the mental substance of the mind interacts with the matter of the brain through the pineal gland, the organ he believed was moved directly by the human soul. The interaction allowed the material brain to be physically directed by the immaterial mind through what Descartes called "animal spirits"-basically a kind of hydraulic fluid. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

Like life, basketball is messy and unpredictable. It has its way with you, no matter how hard you try to control it. The trick is to experience each moment with a clear mind and open heart. When you do that, the game - and life - will take care of itself. — Phil Jackson

When he tries to extend his power over objects, those objects gain control of him. He who is controlled by objects loses possession of his inner self ... Prisoners in the world of object, they have no choice but to submit to the demands of matter! They are pressed down and crushed by external forces: fashion, the market, events, public opinion. Never in a whole lifetime do they recover their right mind! ... What a pity! — Zhuangzi