Once You Set Your Mind Quotes & Sayings

Through this image he had a glimpse of a strange dark cavern of speculation but at once turned away from it, feeling that it was not yet the hour to enter it. But the nightshade of his friend's listlessness seemed to be diffusing in the air around him a tenuous and deadly exhalation and he found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right or left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shrivelled up, sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead language. His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms:
The ivy whines upon the wall
And whines and twines upon the wall
The ivy whines upon the wall
The yellow ivy on the wall
Ivy, ivy up the wall.
Did any one ever hear such drivel? — James Joyce

So what does all this mean if you desperately want to persuade someone who doesn't want to be persuaded?

The first step is to appreciate that your opponent's opinion is likely based less on fact and logic than on ideology and herd thinking. If you were to suggest this to his face, he would of course deny it. He is operating from a set of biases he cannot even see. As the behavioral sage Daniel Kahneman has written: "We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness." Few of us are immune to this blind spot. That goes for you, and that goes for the two of us as well. And so, as the basketball legend-cum-philosopher Kareem Abdul-Jabbar once put it, "It's easier to jump out of a plane - hopefully with a parachute - than it is to change your mind about an opinion. — Steven D. Levitt

Research at NYU and elsewhere is underscoring just how blind the "us-vs-them" mind-set can make people when they try to process new political information. Once this partisanship mentality kicks in, the brain almost automatically pre-filters facts - even noncontroversial ones - that offend our political sensibilities. — Mary Katharine Ham

Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it. — David Sedaris

I forget myself sometimes, but then I look up, as I am looking up now, and I see in my mind's eye a sheild, strangely changed by a rich encrusting of jewel-like barnacles and cold-water coral, with an eight foot tooth sticking right out of the middle of it. I reach out and the edge of that tooth is still so bitingly sharp after all these years that just a gentle brush with the fingers might send a rain of blood down on these pages. And I bend my head, not too close, and I am sure I can hear, very faintly:
Once I set the sea alight
With a single fiery breath ...
Once I was so mighty that I thought
My name was Death ...
Sing out loud until you're eaten,
Song of melancholy blisss,
For the mighty and the middling
All shall come to THIS ...
The Supper is still singing. — Cressida Cowell

Buddhists Believe In Reincarnation Buddhists don't believe reincarnation but they believe in rebirth. Reincarnation is about endless and set identity that moves from life to another, having the same emotions and memories with it. While rebirth on the other hand doesn't carry any memories or emotions you had in your past life, it is simply a small inscription of them in what's we called karma. Reincarnation and rebirth are rationally different concepts. Reincarnation is a belief that every person has a soul, and the soul travels to another body once their previous body dies. Rebirth explains that there's no permanent thing in the world. Every living creature is a nonstop accumulation of changing conditions that establish the body and mind. — Kiera Goodwin

At it's highest level, the purpose of teaching is not to teach - it is to inspire the desire for learning. Once a student's mind is set on fire, it will find a way to provide its own fuel. — Sydney J. Harris

Picture a girl with her arms full of small packages, too many to hold all at once. When they topple and fall all around her, she stoops down and scoops them all back up, literally re-collecting all the gifts that are already hers. To set your mind is to recollect truth that already belongs to you. — Emily P. Freeman

In order to be successful at anything you choose to do, you must make a 100 percent commitment to what it is you are trying to do. If you put 50 percent of your ability into it, that is all that you will get out of it. You must discipline your body and your mind to work towards the goals you have set. Once you have made this decision, then the work begins. — Johnny Unitas

Strength of bone and fire of mind, all wrapped around a core of steel-hard purpose that would make him a deadly projectile, once set on any course. — Diana Gabaldon

Vices are simply overworked virtues, anyway. Economy and frugality are to be commended but follow them on in an increasing ratio and what do we find at the other end? A miser! If we overdo the using of spare moments we may find an invalid at the end, while perhaps if we allowed ourselves more idle time we would conserve our nervous strength and health to more than the value the work we could accomplish by emulating at all times the little busy bee.
I once knew a woman, not very strong, who to the wonder of her friends went through a time of extraordinary hard work without any ill effects.
I asked her for her secret and she told me that she was able to keep her health, under the strain, because she took 20 minutes, of each day in which to absolutely relax both mind and body. She did not even "set and think." She lay at full length, every muscle and nerve relaxed and her mind as quiet as her body. This always relieved the strain and renewed her strength. — Laura Ingalls Wilder

I believe there is little you cannot do once you set your mind to it. — P.C. Cast

The only religious way in which to regard death is to perceive and reel it as a constituent part of life, as life's holy prerequisite, and not to separate it intellectually, to set it up in opposition to life, or, worse, to play it off against life in some disgusting fashion
for that is indeed the antithesis of a healthy, noble, reasonable, and religious view. The ancients decorated their sarcophagi with symbols of life and procreation, some of them even obscene. For the ancients, in fact, the sacred and the obscene were very often one and the same. Those people knew how to honor death. Death is to be honored as the cradle of life, the womb of renewal. Once separated from life, it becomes grotesque, a wraith
or even worse. For as an independent spiritual power, death is a very depraved force, whose wicked attractions are very strong and without doubt can cause the most abominable confusion of the human mind. — Thomas Mann

The city is tricky. The highs are so much higher, but in the lows you drop straight down again to bedrock. It helps that streets are snapped to a grid. There are also psychic boutiques and sidewalk prophets, but until you contrive your own love story set in that city, even one as warped as mine, you remain outside it, looking for signals in the white smoke that rises from under, in the sudden hot laundry smells and the LED typos of street vendors donuteasily becomes dount, ominously like don't, to my mind. There was a DOUNT sign on Second Avenue which more than once redirected my superstitious footsteps. — Olivia Sudjic

But however small it was [the thought], it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind -put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. — Virginia Woolf

I nodded, but I didn't know how to tell her how wrong she was. That it's possible for a man to interpret a woman's initial permission as license to steamroll any boundary she may set after that. That once a woman says yes, it's possible a man might not give a shit when she changes her mind. — Amy Hatvany

It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively, without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind;
but when a beginning is made
when the felicities of rapid motion have once been, though slightly, felt
it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more. — Jane Austen

All reading matter, fiction or nonfiction, inspirational or factual - no matter where the stage is set whether the books were printed a hundred or more years ago or only yesterday, whether or not we like what we read - is a journey for the mind. We find ourselves in strange countries and walk in them with strange people, for a time. Often we do not like what we see and hear and encounter; often we do not comprehend it. It's like arriving someplace at night, and then in the morning looking out of the windows, not understanding what we see.
However, whether we travel with pleasure or repulsion, comprehension or bewilderment, these journeys expand the mind and enlarge our grasp of the world that once was or that which is now, or even that which may sometime be. — Faith Baldwin

Folks in the wagon train figured Ma would turn back, but they hadn't known Ma so long as I had. Once she set her mind to something she wasn't about to quit. — Louis L'Amour

I used to be pro-choice." ... "I was once pro-choice and the thing that changed my mind was, I read my husband's biology books, medical books, and what I learned ... At the moment of conception, a life starts. And this life has its own unique set of DNA, which contains a blueprint for the whole genetic makeup. The sex is determined. We know there's a life because it's growing and changing. — Kathy Ireland

She left her water pot because she had now found a well of 'living water.' She had come to the well for literal water and that was what her mind was set on. But now that she had obtained salvation, she did not think any more about her water pot. It is always this way. Once our souls truly perceive Christ, once we know Him and receive Him as our personal Savior, we turn away from what we used to think about. Her mind was now fixed on Christ, and she had no thought of well, water, or water pot." Granted, even after we come to Christ and learn to drink of His living water, there can be a time when we must learn how to leave the other "water behind" and it is certainly not always an instantaneous exchange of water, like the woman at the well did. We are not saying that it always has to happen in this manner, but what we are saying is that as we drink of Christ's living water we are able to leave behind the sinful water. — Arthur W. Pink

Who says you failed?" Dad stroked her hair back from her face. His expression was tender. "I'm just thinking of what I know about Will Traynor, what I know about men like him. And I'll say one thing to you. I'm not sure anyone in the world was ever going to persuade that man once he'd set his mind to something. He's who he is. You can't make people change who they are. — Jojo Moyes

Getting rich, or becoming outstanding at anything is all a matter of attitude. You must make up your mind once and for all - you commit yourself - and then just stay with it until you finally have what you set out to get. — Earl Nightingale

As I've already mentioned, there is just one way to escape this negative spiral - by tidying efficiently all at once, as quickly as possible, to make the perfect clutter-free environment. But how does this create the right mind-set? When you tidy your space completely, you transform the scenery. The change is so profound that you feel as if you are living in a totally different world. This deeply affects your mind and inspires a strong aversion to reverting to your previously cluttered state. The key is to make the change so sudden that you experience a complete change of heart. The same impact can never be achieved if the process is gradual. To achieve a sudden change like this, you need to use the most efficient method of tidying. Otherwise, before you know it, the day will be gone and you will have made no headway. The more time it takes, the more tired you feel, — Marie Kondo

Darkness
I find myself set upon a ship of fools and cast adrift.
Adrift in sea of madness, steaming towards a storm of uncertainty.
Overboard, swirling, twirling tumbling.
Engulfed in madness.
Shipwrecked, marooned.
Washed upon a rock of hope.
Darkness surrounds.
Within the darkness madness laps upon a distant shore.
Morning breaks and sun rises once more.
Darkness retreats into the shadows.
Golden rays of light cleanse the mind and soul.
A new day dawns heralding sanity, and hope
for the human race once more. — Michael Tianias

It is easier to list modes of behaviour that are required or forbidden than to set reason to work; but once the mind has been stored with useful knowledge and strengthened by being used, the regulation of the behaviour may safely be left to its guidance without the aid of formal rules. — Mary Wollstonecraft

I'm sorry if I seem to digress, but that is precisely what I was thinking at the moment. It's the way my mind works. Things are not the same in real life as they are in, for instance, the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes. Brains, in reality, do not go clickety-clickety-clickety-click from A to B to C to D and so forth, rushing like a train along the rails, until at the end, with a happy "Toot-toot!" they arrive at their destination, Z, and the case is suddenly solved. Quite the contrary. In reality, analytical minds such as my own are forever shooting wildly off in all directions simultaneously. It's like joyously hitting jelly with a sledgehammer; like exploding galaxies; like a display of fireworks in which the pyrotechnic engineer has had a bit too much to drink and set off the whole conglobulation all at once, by accident. — Alan Bradley

When the first objective is reached, what then? Set another one beyond that, immediately. Why? Because the peculiar nature of the Outer Mind is to drop back into inertia after achieving an objective. You can imagine the Outer Mind saying something like this, 'Well, I have been mercilessly driven, and forced to attain that goal, and now that I've reached it I'm going to rest.' And your answer will be, 'No rest for you, for I've already started you on another.' Once you have attained that valuable momentum, maintain it. Cling to it. And as the momentum increases, the steps in your progress become more rapid, until eventually it's possible to reach an objective almost immediately. — John McDonald

There are twenty ways of going to a point, and one is the shortest; but set out at once on one. A man who has that presence of mind which can bring to him on the instant all he knows, is worth for action a dozen men who know as much, but can only bring it to light slowly. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

No man as godly as George, the only fault he finds with God is that he made folk with too few orifices. If George could meet a woman with a quinny under her armpit, he would call out 'Glory be' and set her up in a house and visit her every day, until the novelty wore off. Nothing is forbidden to George, you see. He'd go to it with a terrier bitch if she wagged her tail at him and said bow-wow.'
For once he is struck silent. He knows he will never get it out of his mind, the picture of George in a hairy grapple with a little ratting dog. — Hilary Mantel

They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me; only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mind as consciousness lapsed, in the unspoken tongue, once, clearly, 'Arek!' Then no more. I held him, crouching there in the snow, while he died. They let me do that. Then they made me get up, and took me off one way and him another, I going to prison and he into the dark. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I hate nice girls.
Just exchanging greetings with them will get them on your mind.
Start texting each other, and your heart will be set a flutter.
If they call you, you're done for.
Enjoy staring at your logs and grinning like a fool.
However, I won't get fooled again. That's what your kind calls kindness.
If you're nice to me, you're nice to others.
I always end up nearly forgetting that. Reality is cruel,
So I'm sure lies are a form of kindness.
Thus, I say kindness itself is also a lie.
I always ended up with these expectations.
And I always ended up with these misunderstandings.
And before I knew it, I stopped hoping.
A highly trained loner is once bitten, twice shy.
As a veteran on this battlefield of life, I've gotten used to losing.
That's why I always hate nice girls. - Hachiman Hikigaya — Wataru Watari

Indifference

This hate has blossomed like a living love,
grieving, watching its own exhaustion.
It seeks a face, it seeks flesh, as though it were love.

The worldly flesh and the voices that spoke
are dead, all has shuddered away,
all life hangs on a voice.
Days pass in bitter ecstasy to the sad
caress of the voice that returns
and drains the blood from our faces. Not without sweetness
that voice returns to the mind exhausted
and trembling: once it trembled for me.

But the flesh does not tremble. Only love
could set it alight, this hate seeks it out.
All the possessions, all the flesh and all the voices
in the world cannot equal the burning caress
of that body and those eyes. In the bitter ecstasy
that kills itself, this hate still finds
each day a glance, a broken word,
and grasps them, hungrily, like love. — Cesare Pavese

My final note is on obligation. Once you have set pen to paper or fingertips to keys you have entered into an obligation. I believe if you are going to write then you need to be strong enough to fulfill that obligation. You have an obligation to the imagination, mind, and very soul of the person whom will read the words you write down. That person is entrusting you and your word to carry him or her on a journey, an adventure, a quest. You literally have that person in the palm of your hand. Your obligation is to carry them without faltering and return them safely home again, hopefully a better person, for having embarked on your journey. — Jess Fulton

I am living in many dimensions at once; the appearance of being trapped in time and space is an illusion: Today I will experience myself beyond limitations. I will set time aside to be present with myself in silence. As I breathe I will see my being spreading outward in all directions. As I settle into my own inner silence, any image that comes to mind will be asked to join my being. I will include anyone and anything that comes to mind, saying, "You and I are one at the level of being. Come, join me beyond the drama of space and time." In the same way I will experience love as a light that begins in my heart and spreads out as far as my awareness can reach; as images arise in my mind, I will send love and light in their direction. — Deepak Chopra

It should be a man's task, says the Imitation, 'to overcome himself, and every day to be stronger than himself.' 'In withstanding of the passions standeth very peace of heart.' 'Let us set the axe to the root, that we being purged of our passions may have a peaceable mind.' To this end there must be continual self-examination. 'If thou may not continually gather thyself together, namely sometimes do it, at least once a day, the morning or the evening. In the morning purpose, in the evening discuss the manner, what thou hast been this day, in word, work, and thought. — Marcus Aurelius

If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean - even if it did build muscle - whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one's learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same me but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period ... the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities. — Christopher Hitchens

In night...
in night is when my mind is a flutter, and the world ablaze.
In night I see you, subtle, yet sure wrinkles in your smile and the echoes of your laugh.

In night
my mind tries to forget, but it is still there branded as etchings.

In night
my heart is set a fire thrashing to and fro from distant lands and seas.

You were a sailor but your anchor was no match for the wild waves and so you floated, but quickly sank.

And in night I write about a hundred moons and a hundred deaths. But they are all you.
For you are the sky and the wild seas.
And in night, I think, I will sail across your shore once again and once more. — Queenbe Monyei

She thought of the hawk, which must have winged its way to her father by now. SHe imagined it slewing aruond trees, dropping down. Talons closing around his upraised fist. Her father unrolling the coded message. The trap she'd set for him.

Walk into it , she willed.

You have a mind for strategy , he'd said once.

Come see, then.

See what I can do to you. See what you have done to me. — Marie Rutkoski

I don't think there has been a single thing in the history of forever that my wife hasn't accomplished once she set her mind to it." "Only you could find a way to make absolute, unrepentant stubbornness sound like a virtue and not a sin. — L.M. Pruitt

If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it's hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the "Obama economy" and how it had affected his life. I don't doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he's made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day. — J.D. Vance

I just think God put me on this earth as a tool ... showing people you can achieve stuff once you set you mind to things, that it can be accomplished. — Tito Ortiz

Your desire for consistency itself will set you on the right path. As long as you keep going up, never mind if you come down once or twice. — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

In our day, there are stresses and fractures of the human-animal bond, and some forces at work would sever it once and for all. They pull us in the wrong direction and away from the decent and honorable code that makes us care for creatures who are entirely at our mercy. Especially within the last two hundred years, we've come to apply an industrial mind-set to the use of animals, too often viewing them as if they were nothing but articles of commerce and the raw material of science, agriculture, and wildlife management. Here, as in other pursuits, human ingenuity has a way of outrunning human conscience, and some things we do only because we can
forgetting to ask whether we should. — Wayne Pacelle

Life was about loss. One minute standing on the promise of your dreams, then free-falling backward into nothingness. Is this what it meant to grow old? To gradually be stripped of all you cared about. And then what? Were you supposed to spend the rest of your life, dreaming about the past while you waited to die? Or did you start a new life, set the cycle in motion once again. Take the chance of losing that, too. And if you did, what happened to the old life? Did it die away from lack of attention? — Shelley Noble