Wandering Mind Quotes

#1. I do not think I'm easy to define. I have a wandering mind. And I'm not anything that you think I am.

Syd Barrett

#2. Meditation stills the wandering mind and establishes us forever in a state of peace.

Swami Muktananda

#3. You who are bent, and bald, and blind, With a heavy heart and a wandering mind, Have known three centuries, poets sing, Of dalliance with a demon thing.

W.B.Yeats

#4. The researchers summarized: "A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.". Long ago, Buddhists reached much the same conclusion.

David Michie

#5. When you are simply observing your breath, you are perceiving an automatically unfolding process in your body. By contrast, when you are observing your wandering mind, you are also experiencing the spontaneous activity of a process in your body.

Thomas Metzinger

#6. A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

Sam Harris

#7. Remember that breath walking - as with any meditation technique - should not be pursued with a grim determination to 'get it right.' The point is to cultivate openness, relaxation and awareness, which can include awareness of your undisciplined, wandering mind.

Andrew Weil

#8. The criteria for coming to Jesus is weariness. Come overwhelmed with life. Come with your wandering mind. Come messy.

Paul E. Miller

#9. The turning of the charkha in a lifeless way will be like the turning of the beads of the rosary with a wandering mind turned away from God.

Mahatma Gandhi

#10. The saints, too, had wandering minds. The saints, too, had constantly to recall their constantly wandering mind-child home. They became saints because they continued to go after the little wanderer, like the Good Shepherd.

Peter Kreeft

#11. Yoga practice can make us more and more sensitive to subtler and subtler sensations in the body. Paying attention to and staying with finer and finer sensations within the body is one of the surest ways to steady the wandering mind. (39)

Ravi Ravindra

#12. Evagrius said, 'A wandering mind is strengthened by reading, and prayer. Passion is dampened down by hunger and work and solitude. Anger is repressed by psalmody and long-suffering and mercy. But all these should be at the proper times and in due measure.

Benedicta Ward

#13. A mind not set on God is given to wandering and lacks the quality of a temple of worship.

Mahatma Gandhi

#14. It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.

Michel De Montaigne

#15. If the mind falls asleep, awaken it. Then if it starts wandering, make it quiet. If you reach the state where there is neither sleep nor movement of mind, stay still in that, the natural (real) state.

Ramana Maharshi

#16. Speaking as a phenomenologist, it seems to me that a considerable portion of mind wandering actually is "mental avoidance behaviour", an attempt to cope with adverse internal stimuli or to protect oneself from a deeper processing of information that threatens self-esteem.

Thomas Metzinger

#17. [He] was an insect wandering in the cathedral his mind had become.

Vernor Vinge

#18. What holy cities are to nomadic tribes - a symbol of race and a bond of union - great books are to the wandering souls of men: they are the Meccas of the mind.

George Edward Woodberry

#19. I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush and it is the same river who before I can bring my friends to view his work erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind's eye.

Aldo Leopold

#20. When your mind is wandering about elsewhere you have no chance to express yourself. But if you limit your activity to what you can do just now, in this moment, then you can express fully your true nature, which is the universal Buddha nature.

Shunryu Suzuki

#21. Adults forget the depths of languor into which the adolescent mind decends with ease. They are prone to undervalue the mental growth that occurs during daydreaming and aimless wandering

Edward O. Wilson

#22. The whole blear world of smoke and twisted steel around my head in a railroad car, and my mind wandering past the rust into futurity: I saw the sun go down in a carnal and primeval world, leaving darkness to cover my railroad train because the other side of the world was waiting for dawn.

Allen Ginsberg

#23. He picked up his knife and started carving again. He concentrated on the lines and planes of the wood to keep his mind from wandering too far into the past.
He had his own wounds that refused to heal.

Lorraine Heath

#24. There is a fine sense of freedom that comes from wandering about a familiar city with no particular destination in mind, with no one to meet, no duties, no obligations. I had nothing to do and a thousand nameless, sun-drenched streets to do it in.

Steven Saylor

#25. Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

Milan Kundera

#26. It is a mind-wandering time
Remember the old times
when illusions were distinct
Remember the old times
when a friendly chat
was all we needed
to brighten up our hearts

Rixa White

#27. I do not say, however, that every delusion or wandering of the mind should be called madness. Erasmus of Rotterdam, The Praise of Folly There

Samuel R. Delany

#28. Are you there? If your mind is not there, you are not there! You are wherever your mind is wandering!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#29. Life is a dancing mind, loving heart, caring soul, and wandering thoughts.

Debasish Mridha

#30. Europe was best described, to his mind, as an elaborate engine for dissociating the confined American from that indispensable knowledge, and was accordingly only rendered bearable by these occasional stations of relief, traps for the arrest of wandering western airs.

Henry James

#31. Reading has always been like breathing for me, necessary for existing and thinking. But recently, I find, as I try to make it through the pages, my mind keeps wandering to my phone. What's happening there? What am I missing?

Nancy Jo Sales

#32. I was trying to daydream but my mind kept wandering.

Steven Wright

#33. I have been Merlin wandering in the woods Of a far country, where the winds waken Unnatural voices , my mind broken By a sudden acquaintance with man's rage.

R.S. Thomas

#34. It takes a fictionalized or invented excursion to buy a pencil in the winter dusk of London as an excuse to explore darkness, wandering, invention, the annihilation of identity, the enormous adventure that transpires in the mind while the body travels a quotidian course.

Rebecca Solnit

#35. providing the element of slight distraction to keep the mind from wandering. Each

John Charles Pollock

#36. mixed company" meant me. No one else seemed to mind that people were wandering around with their naughty bits out.

Lucy Lyons

#37. We must resist wandering thoughts in prayer. Raising our hands reminds us that we need to raise up our minds to God, setting aside all irrelevant thoughts.

John Calvin

#38. The thought of his mind wandering while long sharp objects were trying to knock him off his horse alarmed me.

Courtney Cole

#39. My mind is wandering like a squirrel on Red Bull.

Helena Hunting

#40. You have been counting rosary beads for an era
But the wandering of your mind does not halt
Forsake the beads in your hand
And start moving the beads of your heart.

Vikas Swarup

#41. Follow the wandering, the distraction, find out why the mind has wandered; pursue it, go into it fully. When the distraction is completely understood, then that particular distraction is gone. When another comes, pursue it also.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#42. Sorry ... my mind was wandering ... one time it went all the way to Venus and ordered a meal I couldn't pay for.

Steven Wright

#43. My mind started wandering. I started playing carefully, instead of playing the way that had gotten me to that point. I had to force myself to keep driving the ball.

Tracy Austin

#44. For when the mind becomes bound to a passion of the wandering senses, this passion carries away man's wisdom, even as the wind drives a vessel on the waves.

Juan Mascaro

#45. We must do our business faithfully, without trouble or disquiet, recalling our mind to God mildly, and with tranquility, as often as we find it wandering from him.

Brother Lawrence

#46. We are not responsible for every thought that goes wandering through our mind. We are, however, responsible for the ones we hold there. We're especially responsible for the one's we put there.

Peter McWilliams

#47. When everything else crumbles to dust, all we have left are the memories. I thought of Ophelia, wandering the theater, mind half gone ... Never shall I cut from memory my sweet love's beauty.

Lisa Mantchev

#48. Where the mountain crosses.
On top of the mountain, I do not myself know where.
I wandered where my mind and my heart seemed to be lost.
I wandered away.

Jane Bierhorst

#49. How can you keep your mind from wandering when you pray? Remember what you are doing: talking to God. If you had the opportunity to talk with the president, I doubt if your mind would wander. [We] have the privilege of talking to someone far greater: the King of kings!

Billy Graham