Quotes About The Life Of The Mind

#1. Anti-intellectualism is a disposition to discount the importance of truth and the life of the mind.

Os Guinness

#2. I remember once asking Grandma about a book she was reading, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and how she answered me: this was the first conversation of my life that concerned a book, and 'the life of the mind' - and now, such subjects have become my life.

Joyce Carol Oates

#3. The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.

Hannah Arendt

#4. What I think separates me from most philosophers probably is that I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind, I'm a jazzman in the world of ideas.

Cornel West

#5. The life of the mind is reality, and love without romantic illumination is a spiritless matter.

Ellen Glasgow

#6. Knowledge is the life of the mind.

Abu Bakr

#7. All my life I've read that the life of the mind is preeminent, and that it can transcend all bodily degradation. But that's just not my experience. When your body has to deal all day with shit and string beans, your mind does too.

Marilyn French

#8. Let beliefs fade fast and frequently, if you wish institutions to remain the same. The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself.

G.K. Chesterton

#9. When we say we can pull resources away from libraries, from culture, from those parts of the education system that are not about utility, what we are really saying is that the life of the mind is unnecessary.

Jeanette Winterson

#10. What makes human life meaningful? I still felt literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain.

Paul Kalanithi

#11. If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea.

Richard Hofstadter

#12. The life of the mind is only open to rich people.

Aristotle.

#13. I would say you have to fight in the life of the mind as well as fight in the streets, as well as fight in the courts, as well as fight in congress and the White House. Every site is a sight of contestation.

Cornel West

#14. Never experiencing the life of the mind scars entire families for generations.

Joe Bageant

#15. There's a certain pleasure of the life of the mind that cannot be denied. There's a certain pleasure about being around people who enact a playfulness when it comes to the world of ideas.

Cornel West

#16. I'd say that most of life seems to me to be that way, a mixture of the mundane and the mythic, when you're living the life of the mind.

Laurie Foos

#17. My father was a classic intellectual. From him I learned devotion, and I also learned about the life of the mind.

Brian Dennehy

#18. The sad fact is that if you love education, revere the life of the mind, care about the pursuit of truth, think young people need to receive wisdom from their elders, and value moral clarity, the university is the last place you would want to send your 18-year-old.

Dennis Prager

#19. The life of the mind is always more interesting than the real. The idea is often more interesting than the actual.

Rob Chapman

#20. The life of the mind is inappropriate in America now. Don't ever say anything unusual--unless the organization has approved it beforehand. Follow the rules. Be afraid. Be careful. Be a very good boy or girl.

Ryan Blacketter

#21. What is an intellectual? In general, someone seriously devoted to what used to be called the "life of the mind": thinking pursued not instrumentally, for the sake of practical goals, but simply for the sake of knowing and understanding.

Gary Gutting

#22. Much has been written about the life of the mind.

Annie Dillard

#23. I love the academy in terms of the life of the mind and the world of ideas. I also love the streets. I love the churches and mosques and synagogues. I love the trade union centers. I love the community centers. I speak regularly at prisons and so forth.

Cornel West

#24. They had been brought up in a tradition that told them in one way or another that the life of the mind and the life of the senses were separate and, indeed, inimical; they had believed, without ever having really thought about it, that one had to be chosen at some expense of the other.

John Edward Williams

#25. Artists no longer starve in garrets. Some people may think this is not wholly a good thing, that being an artist has become too comfortable, at least in the West. I'm not sure I agree. It's a mark of civilization to encourage the arts and the life of the mind.

J.M. Coetzee

#26. I want young people to look at me and go, 'Damn, I want to be like that brother. He sharp, he be on point. He represent black people.' I want to make the life of the mind sexy.

Michael Eric Dyson

#27. There are various forms of weaponry, intellectual weaponry, spiritual weaponry, political weaponry, economic weaponry. Because we are on the battlefield, and there are bullets flying, some symbolic, some literal and the life of the mind is a crucial place where the battle goes on.

Cornel West

#28. If we are going to be wise, spiritual people prepared to meet the crises of our age, we must be a studying, learning community that values the life of the mind

J.P. Moreland

#29. Americans revered action and were suspicious of intellect, associating the life of the mind with the languid, ineffectual European aristocracy they had left behind.

Susan Cain

#30. All adventurers came to grief. Perhaps they had not been able to make the transition, to alchemize the life of the mind into the life of the senses. They died when their minds were overpowered by nature, yet they did not hesitate to dilute it in alcohol.

Anais Nin

#31. She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.

Charles Frazier

#32. The maxims of Christian life, which should draw upon the truths of the Gospel, are always partially symbolic of the mind and temperament of those who teach them to us. The former, by their natural sweetness, show us the quality of God's mercy; the latter, by their harshness, show us God's justice.

Madeleine De Souvre, Marquise De ...

#33. Regardless of what you believe in or conceive of as the functionality of Reality, the Oneness of you with all you experience in your life is an absolute

Thomas Daniel Nehrer

#34. I have all the time in the world from life to life to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing, infinitely perfect within, why cry, why worry, perfect like mind essence and the minds of banana peels.

Jack Kerouac

#35. The thought went through my mind that we should film ourselves in our sexual act, and project our frenzied copulation permanently onto the walls of the tea-room, as a lesson to wake up the boring people who drank tea here, and to show them what life was really all about.

Fiona Thrust

#36. I suppose that one of the greatest benefits of studying Isaiah is the process of studying Isaiah. Searching the scriptures puts you in a pondering, searching frame of mind in which inspiration can come, allowing you to find ways to apply scriptural truths to your life.

John Bytheway

#37. A woman's belly is the garden of life. Her mind is the gateway to meaning. Her heart is the source of love. And her eyes are the light by which the whole world sees beauty.

Toni Sorenson

#38. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

Janet Fitch

#39. Until you realize how easily it is for your mind to be manipulated, you remain the puppet of someone else's game.

Evita Ochel

#40. With my somewhat vague aspiring mind, to be imprisoned in the rude details of a most material life was often irksome.

Edward Carpenter

#41. Motherhood isn't just a series of contractions; it's a state of mind. From the moment we know life is inside us, we feel a responsibility to protect and defend that human being.

Erma Bombeck

#42. The slow rhythm of the body, the insistent rhythm of the wit, were they becoming irreconcilable in modern civilisation? The sedentary life, frustration and irritability; work with the body, fatigue - and peace of mind.

Henry Williamson

#43. Good books are to the young mind what the warming sun and the refreshing rain of spring are to the seeds which have lain dormant in the frosts of winter. They are more, for they may save from that which is worse than death, as well as bless with that which is better than life.

Horace Mann

#44. The counsels of the Divine Mind had some glimpse of truth when they said that men are born in order to suffer the penalty for sins committed in a former life.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#45. What's important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision that the commission made up. It's up to you to make your life. Take what you have and stack it up like a tower of teetering blocks. Build your dream around that.

Cheryl Strayed

#46. The mind of the child is not formed. We are shown that this is life, this is the world.

Frederick Lenz

#47. As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed an narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train.

Robert Louis Stevenson

#48. I might not be all that good with mathematics in class; but go into my mind; and you will see that type of mathematic I put in; in my everyday life, and you can say that I am genius in a way in the terms of mentality; but retarded in class.

Temitope Owosela

#49. Earth rejoices our words, breathing and peaceful steps. Let every breath, every word and every step make the mother earth proud of us.

Amit Ray

#50. A man who has made up his mind on a given subject twenty-five years ago and continues to hold his political opinions after he has been proved to be wrong is a man of principle; while he who from time to time adapts his opinions to the changing circumstances of life is an opportunist.

A.P. Herbert

#51. Every cloud doesn't have a silver lining but making time to look at the beauty of clouds can give you peace of mind

C.L. Bennett

#52. Make up your mind that nothing is more important than how I feel now, because now is everything. Now is the whole enchilada. Now is the power of me. Now, now, now, now, now ... You might as well start somewhere, and it might as well be now. Why not start improving your life now, now, now?

Esther Hicks

#53. I can not go through the ocean. i can not drive the streets at night. i can not wake up in the morning without you on my mind. and so your gone and im haunted i bet you are just fine. did i make it that easy to walk right in and out of my life.

A Fine Frenzy

#54. Never mind failures; they are quite natural,
they are the beauty of life, these failures.
What would be LIFE without them

Swami Vivekananda

#55. You have to keep your goal in mind and never lose sight of it. I envisioned myself winning the heavyweight title for ten years before I actually captured it. If you're not driven to do your best, you'll never reach the level of excellence in your life.

George Foreman

#56. the safest place to keep your secrets is to keep them in your mind with a locked tongue

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#57. Through the window of my soul and the mirror of my mind, I was looking for the beauty of my life. I could not find it, but I found it in the glint of a dew drop at the edge of a dancing leaf.

Debasish Mridha

#58. Accept the challenges of life and you'll continue to find that winning is the spirit of living ... it's merely a state of mind.

Mychal Wynn

#59. You have to know your own mind inside out before you can know the minds of others.

Carla H. Krueger

#60. You would do the same for me. He smiled a big toothy smile before he hopped off my car and walked away, leaving me wondering what was up with the guy in the girl jeans and why I couldn't get him off of my mind.

Magan Vernon

#61. I think that it is expansive for the mind, for the fantasy of children and grownups alike, to understand that the world is huge. There is so much in the world to experience, and the odds are so essential to life.

Jessye Norman

#62. Reading is a choice. The will to do depends the reader. We may or may not do it but when we kill reading, we kill a purposeful mind. Reading a page of a purposeful book per day is not only a great medicine to the mind but also a powerful antidote to ignorance and mediocrity

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#63. With mind distracted, never thinking, "Death is coming,"
To slave away on the pointless business of mundane life,
And then to come out empty
it is a tragic error. (116)
trans by Robert Thurman

Huston Smith

#64. lost a great innocence when I understood that I and my mind were not going to be on good terms for the rest of my life. I can't tell you how tired I am of character-building experiences. But I treasure this part of me; whoever loves me loves me with this in it.

Kay Redfield Jamison

#65. Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

Ayn Rand

#66. Iron can only be destroyed by rust, and rust is a slow process which is caused by the hydrogen ion from water in the environment. Coat yourself against negative thoughts and be careful what you feed your mind because your mind is your greatest asset, make sure you are not using it against yourself.

Uzoma Nnadi

#67. Hope is a flower bud in the garden of the mind, waiting to bloom in the morning sun.

Debasish Mridha

#68. A look into the Human Mind..of how we perceive..How can we see beauty in and around us..Not the correction of evil or pursuit of the virtuous..BUT..pleasure that resides in the Sense of Self !! A Self living in a state of 'nothingness' and beauty as it lies there..from that place! Simple and Deft

Abha Maryada Banerjee

#69. It is easy to remove the mind from harping on the lost illusion of immortality. The disciplined intellect fears nothing and craves no sugar-plum at the day's end, but is content to accept life and serve society as best it may.

H.P. Lovecraft

#70. I'm a great admirer of Primo Levi's work. It's always mind-boggling, the idea of how much pain people can endure and still come back from the edge with a sense of humor, with this tremendous animal desire we have to get on with life.

Allan Gurganus

#71. Libraries shelter the spirit, provide food for the mind, and answer the questions raised by the problems of life. They have been the home of my heart since I was a very young child, in whatever place I happened to live.

Roberta Gellis

#72. The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of the state of your mind.

Wayne W. Dyer

#73. I asked Elsie how much food they needed from outside the community. 'Flour and sugar,' she said, and then thought a bit. 'Sometimes we'll buy pretzels as a splurge.'
It crossed my mind that the world's most efficient psychological evaluation would have just one question: Define splurge.

Barbara Kingsolver

#74. Ideas are not just counters used by the calculating mind; they are also golden vessels full of living feeling. "Freedom" is not a mere abstraction, it is also an emotion. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Pages 310-311.

C. G. Jung

#75. Somehow the body keeps life going despite the ravaging negations of the mind.

Mason Cooley

#76. When I ache to live, my mind loves to stay with the peaceful whiteness of a pigeon's care...in boundless amity..

Munia Khan

#77. Understand that you and you alone create your own opportunities, whether they come to you in the form of a lottery ticket, or a promotion, you brought that into your life.

Stephen Richards

#78. Love and ruin are explained with letters of the alphabet.
The power of the word can describe the glory of the universe. It only requires an open mind and heart.

J.R. Ortiz

#79. And what's so bad about your being deprived of that? ... All things seem unbearable to people who have become spoilt, who have become soft through a life of luxury, ailing more in the mind than they ever are in the body.

Seneca.

#80. Our entire neurobiology acts as a giant input-output system, that receives information from the outside world, processes that information and makes a person react accordingly.

Abhijit Naskar

#81. Smiles are the dance of our soul,
with the music of love,
to express the beauty of mind,
for the happiness of spirit,
and for the joy of the world.

Debasish Mridha

#82. You would think as you get older your mind would fill up with what they call the spiritual side of things, but mine just seems to get more and more practical, trying to get something settled.

Alice Munro

#83. 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

#84. Let the public mind become corrupt, and all efforts to secure property, liberty, or life by the force of laws written on paper will be as vain as putting up a sign in an apple orchard to exclude canker worms.

Horace Mann

#85. Hearts everywhere bear scars of one form of hurt or the other, and it is necessary to keep this in mind when trying to understand why a person is the way he or she is.

Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

#86. Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.

Gunter Grass

#87. I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body focused with the mind upon one vital source.

Anne Rice

#88. The mere stuffing of the mind with a knowledge of facts is not education. The mind must not only possess a knowledge of the truth, but the soul must revere it, cherish it, love it as a priceless gem; and this human life must be guided and shaped by it in order to fulfill its destiny.

Joseph Fielding Smith

#89. Moreover, during his wife's confinement, something had happened that seemed extraordinary to him. He, an unbeliever, had fallen into praying, and at the moment he prayed, he believed. But that moment had passed, and he could not make his state of mind at that moment fit into the rest of his life.

Leo Tolstoy

#90. As you meditate, you will be able to look at the beauties and horrors of life and accept them with an equal mind. You will love more and be kinder to those around you.

Frederick Lenz

#91. Every moment of every day, your mind chooses whether you focus on the angelic or the demonic, on your life's blessings or your tragedies, on the flashes of insight or the reminders of trouble.

Catherine Carrigan

#92. The transformation toward eternal life is gradual. The heavy gross energy of body, mind, and spirit must first be purified and uplifted. When the energy ascends ... then self mastery can be sought.

Laozi

#93. One of the characteristics of modern political life is its professionalization, such that it attracts mainly the kind of people with so great an avidity for power and self-importance that they do not mind very much the humiliations of the public exposure to which they are inevitably subjected.

Theodore Dalrymple

#94. Love is misunderstood by many.
Love is to be in the state of calmness even when everything is getting destroyed of you & around you.
Love is to be Permanent in the law of impermanence.

Chetan M. Kumbhar

#95. A vision flashed across Nick's mind. It was the image of a lipstick kiss his wife left for him on the mirror that morning. It hung there like the single digit sum to the chalkboard-crammed equation of his life.

Gary Ponzo

#96. Swing is so much more than a dance, it's a way of life. The music gets stuck in your mind and the dance is in your heart and the whole scene is engraved on your soul. You can fly.

Nicholas Hope

#97. And she had the magic I had never come across all my life. A minute with her messed up my mind and heart in a way that all the theories of right and wrong didn't matter anymore. All of a sudden opening my arms to the storm seemed a better choice, than dancing under the rainbows.

Akshay Vasu

#98. All you have in life is your reputation: you may be very rich, but if you lose your good name, then you'll never be happy. The thought will always lurk at the back of your mind that people don't trust you.

Richard Branson

#99. And if ever you need encouragement, remember at least two sober facts which nobody can rationally deny: that you are a new and unique living force in nature, and that you can, by taking thought and pursuing it, become more and more intensely alive.

John Steeksma

#100. Life of Ages, richly poured,
Love of God unspent and free,
Flowing in the Prophet's word
And the People's liberty!
Never was to chosen race
That unstinted tide confined;
Thine is every time and place,
Fountain sweet of heart and mind!

Samuel Johnson