Mind Spark Quotes & Sayings

My parents were the ones who gave me the independence, who gave me the spark to do anything that you set your mind to, as all parents should do for their kids. — Marlee Matlin

For the courage of her heart, which I saw face down the greatest horrors I know without breaking. For the high and hungry intelligence of her mind, which never stops asking questions, nor thinking about the answers. For the spark of her spirit, which could teach bonfires how to burn. That's three. Enough for going on with. All this is set beside me, and you ask me instead if I want dirt? I do not understand farmers — Lois McMaster Bujold

It was on a meteorologically challenged November night that Frankenstein infused the spark of being into the creature and saw its dull yellow eye open. Breathless horror filled Frankenstein's heart as a vision of the next twenty years flashed through his mind. There would be responsibilities--schooling, education, clothing--and he was a lone parent! — Lawrence Held

Historical, religious, and existential treatises suggest that for some persons at some times, it is rational not to avoid physical death at all costs. Indeed the spark of humanity can maximize its essence by choosing an alternative that preserves the greatest dignity and some tranquility of mind. — Norman Mailer

Fighter pilot is an attitude. It is cockiness. It is aggressiveness. It is self-confidence. It is a streak of rebelliousness, and it is competitiveness. But there's something else - there's a spark. There's a desire to be good. To do well; in the eyes of your peers, and in your own mind. — Robin Olds

I am a spark from the Infinite. I am not flesh and bones. I am light. In helping others to succeed I shall find my own prosperity. In the welfare of others I shall find my own well-being. I am infinite. I am spaceless, I am tireless; I am beyond body thought, and utterance; beyond all matter and mind. I am endless bliss. — Paramahansa Yogananda

[The little black boy] had seen Tarzan bring down a buck, just as Numa, the lion, might have done ... Tibo had shuddered at the sight, but he had thrilled, too, and for the first time there entered his dull, Negroid mind a vague desire to emulate his savage foster parent. But Tibo, the little black boy, lacked the divine spark which had permitted Tarzan, the white boy, to benefit by his training in the ways of the fierce jungle. In imagination he was wanting, and imagination is but another name for super-intelligence.
Imagination it is which builds bridges, and cities, and empires. The beasts know it not, the blacks only a little, while to one in a hundred thousand of earth's dominant race it is given as a gift from heaven that man may not perish from the earth. — Edgar Rice Burroughs

Haiku are meant to evoke an emotional response from the reader ... to light the spark that triggers creative rumination ... They act as literary manifestations ... visions of nature's seasonal modulations ... They're emotionally tinged words, barely perceptible sensory flickers ... literary etchings of lucid visions transposed into the minds of its readers ... They're meant to act as sensory catalysts ... like the passing of a penciled baton laid out upon a piece of paper that a reader might grasp for in their mind's eye ... all of which prompts the reader to continue exploring the sensory experience elicited from the writers pen ... This is how the literary sketching of poets are intended to function ... as creative muses with which readers can draw from and viscerally apply to their own artistic idioms ... from that lucid space within their heads ... where their minds eye can spark their own creative visions"

Bukusai Ashagawa — Bukusai Ashagawa

Focus - keep the memory of the kiss we shared before I met Cooper in the forefront of my mind. It was nice. Passionate even. There was a spark, I know there was. I just need to get back to that place. Yet I tense up when he moves in closer. "Is it the cameras?" he whispers in my ear. I have no idea how to answer, so I tell him the truth. Well, mostly the truth. It was difficult for me to forget the cameras even before I met Cooper. "Maybe a little." A member of the Throb crew comes out from nowhere. "Sorry to interrupt, guys. But can you speak a little louder? We can't pick up your voices out here too easily." Flynn sighs loudly. "Yeah. No problem. — Vi Keeland

The lightning spark of thought generated in the solitary mind awakens its likeness in another mind. — Thomas Carlyle

Love! What a searing, torturing, intolerably sweet thing it was - this possession of body, soul and mind! With something at its core as fine and remote and purely spiritual as the tiny blue spark in the heart of the unbreakable diamond. No dream had ever been like this. She was no longer solitary. She was one of a vast sisterhood - all the women who had ever loved in the world. — L.M. Montgomery

In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are at its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of people be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved integrity. Do not lose your knowledge that our proper estate is an upright posture,
an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it's yours. — Ayn Rand

But you don't have to take his advice. Whether you use his ideas, or whether they spark some different plan - make your decision and snap out orders. The one thing - the only thing! - that can strike terror in the heart of a good platoon sergeant is to find that he's working for a boss who can't make up his mind. — Robert A. Heinlein

The force of life deep within his chest, a flowering lotus, opened into his consciousness, returning the ancient spark of thought to his mind. — Everet Martins

At this point, there flashed briefly through Stenton's horrified mind the memory of that timeless classic, H. G. Wells's "The Star." He had first read it as a small boy, and it had helped to spark his interest in astronomy. — Arthur C. Clarke

The human mind is a spark of the almighty consciousness of God. I could show you that whatever your powerful mind believes very intensely would instantly come to pass. — Paramahansa Yogananda

Richard looked up at the beautiful, big pines spreading over them, illuminated in the firelight. A spark of understanding lit in his mind. He saw the branches stretched out with murderous intent in a years-long struggle to reach the sunlight and dispatch its neighbors with its shade. Success would give space for its offspring, many of which would also shrivel in the shade of the parent. Several close neighbors of the big pine were withered and weak, victims all. It was true. The design of nature was success by murder. — Terry Goodkind

Showers"

The child tells me, put a brick in the tank,
don't wear leather, don't eat brisket,
snapper, or farmed salmon - not tells,
orders - doesn't she know the sluice gates
are wide open and a trillion gallons
wasted just for the dare of it?

Until the staring eye shares that thrill,
witnessing: I am just iris and cornea,
blind spot where brain meets mind,
the place where the image forms itself
from a spark - image of the coming storm.

Still the child waits outside the bathroom
with the watch she got for Best Essay,
muttering, two minutes too long.

Half measures, I say. She says, action.
I: I'm one man. She: Seven billion.

If you choose, the sea goes back. — Dennis Nurkse

New York, home of the vivisectors of the mind, and of the mentally vivisected still to be reassembled, of those who live intact, habitually wondering about their states of sanity, and home of those whose minds have been dead, bearing the scars of resurrection. — Muriel Spark

It is one of the secrets of Nature in its mood of mockery that fine weather lays heavier weight on the mind and hearts of the depressed and the inwardly tormented than does a really bad day with dark rain sniveling continuously and sympathetically from a dirty sky. — Muriel Spark

I reach down and grab my cock
the rolling scenery in my mind
far from peaceful — Wren Verlaine

Somewhere, deep within me, beyond the passion, beyond the beauty of the night, that little spark of Daily magic ignited in me again, began burning in a place that had gone dark and untended, that had yearned to be bright and warm. I felt it now, something old, something new, something complete. Perhaps it had been in there in me all along, the belief that there is a plan and a purpose, that God whispers into every life, some things that are beyond the scope of the mind, and can only be felt with the heart and the spirit.
Those dreams, the dreams that are dreamed *for* us, not by us, are the truest of all. — Lisa Wingate

No mind should submit their mind to another mind He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still
that's my motto. I won't be brainwashed. — Muriel Spark

I meet a person, and in my mind I'm saying three minutes; I give you three minutes to show me the spark. — Amy Hempel

And that spark will flash in her eyes confirming that her mind never stops working, even in the heat of passion. — Alaa Al Aswany

Significant inventions are not mere accidents. The erroneous view [that they are] is widely held, and it is one that the scientific and technical community, unfortunately, has done little to dispel. Happenstance usually plays a part, to be sure, but there is much more to invention than the popular notion of a bolt out of the blue. Knowledge in depth and in breadth are virtual prerequisites. Unless the mind is thoroughly charge beforehand, the proverbial spark of genius, if it should manifest itself, probably will find nothing to ignite. — Paul Flory

I used to be able to think. My brain's circuits were all connected, and I had spark, a quickness of mind that let me function well in the world. — Floyd Skloot

Who can ever know what turns the spark into flame? Vidanric's initial interest in me might well have been kindled by the fact that he saw my actions as courageous, but the subsequent discovery of passion, and the companionship of the mind that would sutain it, seemed as full of mystery as it was of felicity. As for me, I really believe that the spark had been there all along, but I had been too ignorant--and too afraid--to recognize it. — Sherwood Smith

Many love music but for music's sake, Many because her touches can awake Thoughts that repose within the breast half-dead, And rise to follow where she loves to lead. What various feelings come from days gone by! What tears from far-off sources dim the eye! Few, when light fingers with sweet voices play, And melodies swell, pause, and melt away, Mind how at every touch, at every tone, A spark of life hath glistened and hath gone. — Walter Savage Landor

It probably seems obvious, but as an editor, I love stories. But it's a little bit more than that. I intensely believe that stories have power. They can spark an idea, or a realization. They can, by just offering another perspective, change a person's mind. They can make us weep and cry and care. And they can connect us. That's powerful stuff. — Mariah Huehner

She went about her business in a way that put me in mind of an old matchbook. You can scratch the head against the strip in the same way you always have but you are not going to get any kind of spark. — Tayari Jones

We have invented sex guilt to take our minds off the real thing. — Muriel Spark

Sometimes I wonder if there are some memories the mind doesn't want to deal with and that if it really wants to, it can block out the images, shut down, numb the pain connected to what we saw - what we didn't want to see. If we allow it to, the numbness can drown out everything, even the spark of life inside us. And eventually the person we once were is nothing but a vanishing memory. — Jessica Sorensen

Just as a wet match, when struck, does not produce fire, so a mind saturated with restlessness cannot produce the fire of concentration even when one makes great efforts to strike the cosmic spark. — Paramahansa Yogananda

I don't see any sign of God in this world, in the place where we live and things we know. It can all be explained to my mind perfectly satisfactorily without God. But in the great darkness beyond this little spark of light where I live, of course there may be all kinds of things. There may be a god. So I'm really an agnostic. — Philip Pullman

Most schooling is training for stupidity and conformity, and that's institutional, but occasionally you get a spark, somebody'll challenge your mind, make you think and so on, and that has a tremendous effect you just reach all sorts of people. Of course if you do it you may very have problems, you have to tread the narrow line. There are plenty of people who don't want students to think, they're afraid of the crisis of democracy. If people start thinking you get all these problems that I quoted before. They won't have enough humility to submit to a civil rule or they'll start trying to press their demands in the political arena and have ideas of their own, instead of beleiving what they're told. And privelage and power typically doesn't want that and so they react and the high school teacher that tries to get students to think may find oppression, firing and so on. — Noam Chomsky

Before there was Ronald Reagan there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry, there was National Review , and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind. — William F. Buckley Jr.

Are you there? I call for you.
I've been calling your name,
Searching every place in my mind to find you,
I've lost count of the days, the hours, minutes, and seconds.
The world that looked so vast is now small and empty.
Did you take all the magic with you?
Or perhaps the world is in pain like my heart because it's lost your spark. — LeAnne Mechelle

You might be adding a new scar to your collection, but it kind of matches the one on this side of your mouth, so at least they'll be symmetrical."
"I don't mind the scars." He shrugged, his eyes taking on a mischievous spark. "They hold better memories now than they used to. — Marissa Meyer

Sure, I had gained a lot of weight ... I had begun to fear that I would never lose (it) and would be forever confined to this foreign body. The problem was much more superficial - but easier to grapple with - than my real worries about being trapped in my broken mind ... When I worried about being fat forever, marred in the eyes of those closest to me, I was actually worried about who I was going to be: Will I be as slow, dour, unfunny, and stupid as I now felt for the rest of my life? Will I ever again regain that spark that defines who I am? — Susannah Cahalan

A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell. The spark must be guarded like a treasure, it must be nurtured, it must be fanned into flame. It must learn to seek out other sparks, it must dominate the shell. Anything can be a shell, Reuven. Anything. Indifference, laziness, brutality, and genius. Yes, even a great mind can be a shell and choke the spark. — Chaim Potok

Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact. — Muriel Spark

Because it seems like a lot of hassle, liking someone. Your brain runs hot, the cogs inside your mind jarring together until all the oil of your thoughts is burned away. The fire spreads to your chest, where it chars your lungs and turns your heart to embers. And right when you think the flames have burned away everything but your skeleton, the spark skips from your bones to immolate not only your flesh, but your entire life. — Krystal Sutherland

The spark of liberty in the mind and spirit of man cannot be long extinguished; it will break into flames that will destroy every coercion which seems to limit it. — Herbert Hoover

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

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work ... the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp ... The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious. — Muriel Spark

[My novel] took up the sweetest part of my mind and the rarest part of my imagination; it was like being in love and better. All day long when I was busy [ ... ], I had my unfinished novel personified almost as a secret companion and accomplice following me like a shadow wherever I went, whatever I did. — Muriel Spark

Tales of ordinary characters would appeal to a larger class , but I have no wish to make such an appeal . The opinions of the masses are of no interest to me , for praise can truly gratify only when it comes from a mind sharing the author's perspective . There are probably seven persons in all , who really like my work and they are enough . I should write even if I were the only patient reader , for my aim is merely self expression . I could not write about ' ordinary people ' because I am not in the least interested in them . Without interest there can be no art . Man's relations to man do not captivate my fancy . It is man's relations to the cosmos - to the unknown - which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination . — H.P. Lovecraft

Once children learn how to learn, nothing is going to narrow their mind. The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another. — Marva Collins

Was the life force something more than words, a tangible, mind-controlling potency? Was nature somehow, in him, maintaining its spark against its own encroachments? — Richard Matheson

The monk, the inquisitor, and the Jesuit were lords of Spain,- sovereigns of her sovereign, for they had formed the dark and narrow mind of that tyrannical recluse. They had formed the minds of her people, quenched in blood every spark of rising heresy, and given over a noble nation to a bigotry blind and inexorable as the doom of fate. Linked with pride, ambition, avarice, every passion of a rich, strong nature, potent for good and ill, it made the Spaniard of that day a scourge as dire as ever fell on man. — Francis Parkman

Getting a spark of inspiration to write is the best feeling in the world, no matter what time it is...I get a feeling on the inside that urges me to get up from whatever I am doing, grabbing that pen and writing down whatever my heart and mind tell me too... it's beautiful." — Sontia Levy-Mason

He stares into the sky, his eyes absent and empty, an expression that branded its horrible meaning into my mind long, long ago. A candle without a spark, a sky without a sun, the look people get when they cease to be people, start being bodies. — Sara Raasch

What exactly is the new verse movement? The New Verse Movement of the 1910's was to make poetry relevant again by immersing it into the spaces, technologies, and social dynamics of the modern city.
And Now In The Present And Future ?
The New Verse Movement of the 21st Century follows these same beliefs. To somehow ignite the spark and to help make poetry relevant again in a new age of technologies (The Internet) and to support new & experimental as well as older poetic forms. The New Verse Movement of the 21st Century is all about change and free expression of the creative mind. — R.M. Engelhardt

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely ... I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is every- where. — Thomas Merton

The sparkle and morning-freshness of the shop, and the butter-conjuring girl, formed a mind-picture which accompanied the whole of my youth.(about the Buttercup Dairy) — Muriel Spark

The organ has a mind of its own, disregarding what might be unhealthy for you. Once it's been jolted by that spark, awakened by that all-consuming flame, it plays the dirtiest game of all. With each curious beat of wanting to touch, taste, and feel love, the heart routes all logical thoughts from your brain, siphoning them out of that sucker like a thief, spitting them back out onto a highway piled high with nothing but bloody wreckage. — Gail McHugh

Then the Calm kept going. And I realized that my body, mind, and soul needed this time to integrate some of the enormous changes that were going on. I started to appreciate Calm. These last few weeks I feel like I'm getting my spark back. — Kathleen DesMaisons

God the horror of watching yourself from the outside as everything you know about yourself gets stripped away and demolished. Not just the loss of power over your body, but power over your mind. Rape in the deepest, most hellish sense of the word. But wait, there's a spark. Inside that hollowed out woman there's a place they can't touch. There's more to me than I thought there was. Something that no one and nothing can take away from me. They can't break me. I won't cease. I'm strong, and I am never going to go away until I've gotten what I came for. I might have been lost for awhile but I was never gone. WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU? With an explosive inhalation I snap upright in bed, and my eyes fly open like coming alive after being dead and interred in a coffin. I AM Mac and I am BACK! — Karen Marie Moning

No demon can withstand the power of Christ, said my father, repeating the words he had used long ago, and what he meant was that no dissociated mind can withstand the integrating power of the Living God whose spark lies deep in the core of the unconscious mind and who can not only heal the shattered ego but unify the entire personality. — Susan Howatch

Desire is poverty. Desire is the greatest impurity of the mind. Desire is the motive force for action. Desire in the mind is the real impurity. Even a spark of desire is a very great evil. — Swami Sivananda

Inside the human mind, an idea is a mental spark that occurs as a response to the challenge of a train of thought. — Eraldo Banovac

WHEN I STILL USED, I WAS ONCE WORKING IN IBIZA, HEDONISM capital of the nineties and the turn of the millennium. People swayed in sweaty swathes and stayed, pilled-up for days. I couldn't participate, because I was too shy or broken, caught on some taut barbed wire in my mind. Me and my mate Matt, high one night, lost ourselves, found ourselves in a wood and pretended to be animals. It was just us, and we prowled and circled around. We locked eyes and growled and danced. "Let's pretend we're animals" was forgotten, and we were animals. We are animals. We are free animals with a divine spark, we're not in a farm or a zoo or a theme park, we're free. We've forgotten that we're free. — Russell Brand

The flesh of the body does not make it conscious
its the unknown inside that does.
The arms of the galaxy do not make it turn around
its the unknown that holds it together and spin around.
The mind does not create the thought
it's the unknown consciousness
that is plugged to myriad's of portals that does.
A thing of beauty is not made of brick and mortar
it's made of an unknown divine spark.
The world is essentially that unknown
Drop the act and connect to the unknown. — Gabriel Iqbal

The saddest part of a broken heart
Isn't the ending so much as the start
The tragedy starts from the very first spark
Losing your mind for the sake of your heart — Raymond E. Feist

There's a big difference between merely carrying the world inside you and knowing that you do! A madman can produce ideas that resemble Plato's, and a pious little schoolboy in a Herrnhut institute can creatively reconstruct profound mythological associations in his mind, ideas to be found in the Gnostics or Zoroaster. But he doesn't know he's doing it! He's a tree or a stone, at best an animal, just as long as he doesn't know that. But when the first spark of that knowledge glimmers, he becomes a human being. You certainly don't consider all the bipeds running around the street to be human beings merely because they walk upright and carry their young for nine months? After all, you see how many of them are fish or sheep, worms or leeches, how many are ants, how many are bees! Now, each one of them has the potentiality of becoming a human being, but only when he senses that potential, when he even learns to be conscious of it to some degree, does that potential belong to him. — Hermann Hesse

Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of 'ideal' poems that one feels ought to be written, but don't because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A 'real' poem is a pleasure to write. — Philip Larkin

If you think in terms of teaching as a shared journey of discovery, instead of just a job, look what's involved: sharing of knowledge, hunger for understanding, desire for approval, opening of another spirit, penetration of one mind into another, the mystery of the unknown, the pleasure of success, mental intimacy in shared moments of revelation, maybe even climactic moments... Internal changes, growth, expansion, opening, tapping into unconscious longings-well, most of those words describe an erotic relationship. If you hung them all on a clothesline and picked only three, you'd have enough to produce a spark, a thin column of smoke, maybe even a small flame. — Jacquie Gordon

I don't mind the scars." He shrugged, his eyes taking on a mischievous spark. "They hold better memories now than they used to." Scarlet — Marissa Meyer

Once the spark catches, once the prepared, courageous combination of camp, melody, enigma, fantasy, paranoia, electric guitars, shock, male make-up and flirtation took hold, and he found himself at last in the right place at the right time, nothing can stop the momentum from growing. Repressed fantasies, forbidden pleasures, rule-breaking spirit and highly suggestive erotic discrepancies are released with tremendous force into the mainstream. They make it there mostly through Bowie's insatiable mind and body, which has adopted the perfect disguise of an ambiguously sexy, deadly smart and attractively damaged pop star. — Paul Morley

Adrian." I laid my hand over his an felt a warm spark of connection. He jerkedd his head toward me in astonishment. "Nothing he said could change what I think of you. I've had my mind made up about you for a longe time ... and it's all good."
Adrian looked away form me and down to where my hand covered his. I blushed and pulled away. "Sorry." I'd probably freaked him out.
He glanced back up at me. "Best thing that's happened to me all day. Let's hit the road. — Richelle Mead

An idea is an amazing creation of the human mind, which comes either as
a result of one's continuous endeavors for solving a certain problem or just
as a spark that lights up the considered problem. — Eraldo Banovac