Against The Mind Quotes

Terrorism is a crime against the mind. We win by refusing fear. ~ Bruce Schneier

A man cannot un-see the truth. He cannot willingly return to darkness or go blind once he has the gift of sight, anymore than he can be unborn.

We are the only species capable of self-reflection. The only species with the toxin of self-doubt written into our genetic code. Unequal to our gifts we build, we buy, we consume. We wrap ourselves in the illusion of material success. We cheat and deceive as we claw our way to the pinnacle of what we define as achievement; superiority to other men.

But there is a sickness inside us. Rising like the bile that leaves that bitter taste at the back of our throats. We do our best to deny its existence, dealing in lies and distraction. Until one day the body rebels against the mind and screams out… I am not a well man. Only when we know what ails us can we hope to find the cure. ~ Justin Haythe

Dream images swell against the mind's sleeping inner shores ~ Jazz Feylynn

I cannot project the degree of hatred required to make those women run around in crusades against abortion. Hatred is what they certainly project, not love for the embryos, which is a piece of nonsense no one could experience, but hatred, a virulent hatred for an unnamed object ... Their hatred is directed against human beings as such, against the mind, against reason, against ambition, against success, against love, against any value that brings happiness to human life. In compliance with the dishonesty that dominates today's intellectual field, they call themselves pro-life. ~ Ayn Rand

The creature had nut-brown skin mixed with patches of ash. It was human-sized and formed, but its skin looked like the bark of an old, old tree. About the same height as Donna, it was spindly with arms and legs that were all joints and angles. Its face was narrow and pointed, with hair on top of its head like thick moss and narrow black eyes that glinted even in the dim light of the room. The thing's body was clothed in lichen and moss, with vines twining around its sharp limbs. The creature opened its lipless mouth, a dark slash across its twisted face.

Donna's mind flashed back to the party and the shadow she'd seen sliding through the darkness outside Xan's house. She hadn't been imagining things, after all.

The wood elves had returned to the city. ~ Karen Mahoney

So long as our untried senses and our naïve heart recognize themselves and delight in the universe of qualifications, they flourish with the aid and at the risk of the adjective, which, once dissected, proves inadequate, deficient. We say of space, of time, and of suffering that they are infinite; but infinite has no more bearing than beautiful, sublime, harmonious, ugly.... Suppose we force ourselves to see to the bottom of words? We see nothing - each of them, detached from the expansive and fertile soul, being null and void. The power of the intelligence functions by projecting a certain luster upon them, by polishing them and making them glitter; this power, erected into a system, is called culture - pryrotechnics against a night sky of nothingness. ~ Emil M. Cioran

Agnosticism is the natural attitude of the evolutionist. How can a brute mind comprehend spiritual things? ~ William Jennings Bryan

When enemies, the intellect and the heart only see one another as the hater and the fool. ~ Criss Jami

Ethnic Germans also surrendered. Even veterans of the Eastern Front. Corp. Friedrich Bertenrath of the 2nd Panzer Division explained, "In Russia, I could imagine nothing but fighting to the last man. We knew that going into a prison camp in Russia meant you were dead. In Normandy, one always had in the back of his mind, 'Well, if everything goes to hell, the Americans are human enough that the prospect of becoming their prisoner was attractive to some extent. ~ Stephen E. Ambrose

In the back of my mind was the constant hankering, almost yearning, to write but something always stopped me in my tracks. Or if I did find my way to put a pen to paper or finger on a keyboard I'd give up after a few minutes. I'd find other things to do: Anything but writing. ~ Mary Garden

Death doesn't change anything. It just gives you a new location. The physical mind dissolves. But the overriding state of mind that you die in is the state of mind that you are born into. ~ Frederick Lenz

Besides language and music mathematics is one of the primary manifestations of the free creative power of the human mind. ~ Hermann Weyl

An unread book does nobody any good. Stories happen in the mind of a reader, not among symbols printed on a page. ~ Brandon Mull

Passage of time can be mind-numbing to figure out in a screenplay. It's the easiest thing to do in prose, not just by writing 'four years later', but you can shift time in a sentence or two. ~ Mark Boal

Why did they all think alike? Typical bourgeois brainwashed homogeneity? How else could this unvarying calculus abouth the worth of one's own kind measured against the lives of others have come about? ~ Neel Mukherjee

I have the mind to do so many fields, careers, jobs, and hobbies; but I have the heart to do few fields of work, careers, jobs, and hobbies ~ Temitope Owosela

[People] ask themselves, what is suitable for my position? What is usually done by persons of my station and percuniary circumstances? Or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary in preference to what suits their own inclinations. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things that are commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own. ~ John Stuart Mill

This is your life! Do what you love and do it often. If you
don't like something, change it. If you don't like your job, quit. If
you don't have enough time, stop watching TV. If you are looking
for the love of your life, stop: they will be waiting for you when
you are doing the things you love. Stop over analysing, life is
simple. All emotions are beautiful. When you eat, appreciate every
last bite. Open your eyes, open your mind, arms and heart to new
things and new people ~ Russell Strand

What is it that drew us to the hollow tonight? What crazy kind of species is it that leaves a warm home on a rainy night to ferry salamanders across a road? It's tempting to call it altruism, but it's not. There is nothing selfless about it. This night heaps rewards on the givers as well as the recipients. We get to be there, to witness this amazing rite, and, for an evening, to enter into relationship with other beings, as different from ourselves as we can imagine.
It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a "species loneliness" - estrangement from the rest of Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night. For a moment as we walked this road, those barriers dissolved and we began to relieve the loneliness and know each other once again. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

I will drink wine now, for I must prepare myself for the question which my mother will now ask. She will say: "Do you go to Mass every Sunday, my Jimmy?" I will answer: "Sometimes, Ma. Sometimes." I will be lying. She will ask: "Do you still read books against God?" I will say, lying again: "Not any more, Ma." And I will look at the face of my mother, and I will remember a night when we lived in the South, and I came home, and I saw my mother in tears, and sick unto death, and the doctor was called, and he saved my mother, and he came out of the room wherein my mother lay, and he held a book in his hand, and he handed it to me, and he said: "This is the cause. If you must read such stuff as this, do it where your mother can't see you." When I looked at the book, I saw that it was the The Anti-Christ. Now I will be home soon, and my mother will ask if I read books against God, and I will answer that I do not. ~ John Fante

Reality is neither subjective nor objective, neither mind nor matter, neither time nor space. These divisions need somebody to happen to, a conscious separate center. But reality is all and nothing, the totality and the exclusion, the fullness and the emptiness, fully consistent, absolutely paradoxical. You cannot speak about it, you can only lose yourself in it. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Protection against this general monopoly is as difficult as protection against pollution. People will face a danger that threatens their own self-interest but not one that threatens society as a whole. Many more people are against cars than are against driving them. They are against cars because they pollute and because they monopolize traffic. They drive cars
because they consider the pollution created by one car insignificant, and because they do not feel personally deprived of freedom when they drive. It is also difficult to be protected against monopoly when a society is already littered with roads, schools, or hospitals, when independent action has been paralyzed for so long that the ability for it seems to have atrophied, and when simple alternatives seem beyond the reach of the imagination. Monopoly is hard to get 4d of when it has frozen not
only the shape of the physical world but also the range of behavior and of imagination. Radical monopoly is generally discovered only when it is too late. ~ Ivan Illich

Is this how you will die? Is this what you were meant for? To simply be bled out like a pig?
A spark of rage flickers, an antidote to despair.
Will you not even try to survive? Did the scientists make you too stupid even to consider fighting for your own life?
Emiko closes her eyes and prays to Mizuko Jizo Bodhisattva, and then the bakeneko cheshire spirit for good measure. She takes a breath, and then with all her strength she slams her hand against the knife. The blade slices past her neck, a searing line.
"Arai wa?!" the man shouts.
Emiko shoves hard against him and ducks under his flailing knife. Behind her, she hears a grunt and thud as she bolts for the street. She doesn't look back. She plunges into the street, not caring that she shows herself as a windup, not caring that in running she will burn up and die. She runs, determined only to escape the demon behind her. She will burn, but she will not die passive like some pig led to slaughter. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

We laugh & it pits the world against us. ~ Richard Siken

Without him, we are nothing, but the paradox is that we, the figments of another mind, will outlive the mind that made us, for once we are thrown into the world, we continue to exist forever, and our stories go on being told, even after we are dead. ~ Paul Auster

In a couple of days, you will be in hiding. Besides, I am tired and not
ready to meet more Eartherns tonight.'
He chuckled. 'Is that what you call us?'
'It is what the Twilight Keeper calls you.'
'I suppose it's better than muggle.'
'What is a muggle?'
'Long story. Well, seven of them.' He tapped his fingers against the wheel. ~ Cheryse Durrant

Keep in mind this basic axiom - if all that now exists was once imagined, then what you want to exist for you in the future must now be imagined. ~ Wayne W. Dyer

It is practice alone that brings the powers of the mind, as well as those of the body, to their perfection. ~ John Locke

Writing becomes a form of protest against the incontestable ravages of time. The poet takes revenge on mortality, defeating cruelty and saving what she can by thinking the unthinkable and presiding over her own creation. The joy of writing stands against the bitter knowledge of just how much of the world cannot be controlled outside the work of art. This is the art of poetry trying to kill time. Probably ~ Edward Hirsch

I was tired of this silly joking about my 'speaking countenance'. I could keep a secret as well as anyone. Poirot had always persisted in the humiliating belief that I am a transparent character and that anyone can read what is passing in my mind. ~ Agatha Christie

Through a large field that had turned a dead yellow after an early frost, past the multicoloured clapboard company houses and through a flurry of fabric hanging from clotheslines… after a few minutes he stopped at the edge of a high cliff, where a long time ago he'd been able to see the mine towers and orange smog from the steel mill way off in the distance, and he'd been able to stare for hours at the periwinkle-coloured ocean waves crashing against the jagged rocks below. At times he'd wonder what it would be like to cross the ocean. He knew from the books he'd read that he would be in Europe probably, that by plane it took hours, by boat it took weeks depending on the speed of the boat… he knew the street maps of Paris and London and Pennsylvania. He knew all the monumental buildings of the world… but he was unable to leave, if he tried to leave Nova Scotia, Mearth would lock him in the basement of his house for months, maybe even years, in the dark, isolated…
Not even wanting to consider it, he closed his eyes, the swift wind from the ocean gusting through the scraggly grass. As the sun briefly came out in a haze, a kaleidoscope of reds and golds, he lit a cigarette and tried to imagine that the mill and mines were still in their rightful place. ~ Rebecca McNutt

The mind of man plans his way, but the LORD directs his steps. PROVERBS 16:9 ~ Charles R. Swindoll

We should keep in mind that there are always more truths to know, and we will know more as we evolve. Being faithful to what we already know is the key that opens the door to higher truths. ~ Thomas Vazhakunnathu

It just shows you that if you take a plain, ordinary, moronic intern and make him do the same things over and over again until he loses is mind, you can teach him to do almost anything. I think now that I've mastered IVs, I might take up neurosurgery in my spare time. ~ Robert Marion

Why should I tell you where I am going to get funds from? If I were to do that then all the vested interests would get alerted. You must be aware that railways are full of such elements and my fight is against them. ~ Lalu Prasad Yadav

Precisely. Stark was the real deal. Yes, the chance that he could physically harm someone was non-existent, but his intellect meant he could get inside your head. To me, his mind was his most dangerous weapon." "You make him sound like Hannibal Lecter," Joe said with a smile. "Hannibal Lecter is fictional. Obadiah Stark was very real and very dangerous. A sociopath such as him had no desire to be understood or psychologically dissected so that his motivations could be rationalised. He lived to kill, pure and simple. His level of intelligence made him impenetrable to any standard test one would use to perform a psychological autopsy, but it had no bearing on his actions. You could argue someone with such a high IQ would know that killing is wrong, but ~ David McCaffrey

Your honor, why would anyone in their right mind park in the passing lane? ~ Steven Wright

Home is a place in the mind where thoughts grow rich enough to become stories, breaking the silence that exists between souls. ~ Lita Judge

Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that. ~ Dani Shapiro

It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one's own body ... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth. ~ George Orwell

A mind attacked and conquered is guided easily away from the paths of its own soul. ~ Ayi Kwei Armah

The concept of an independent spiritual realm does not augment, for me, the magic of the mystical dimension, whereas to think of this dimension as emergent from our minds makes it all the more wondrous to be a human. ~ Ursula Goodenough

To my mind, nothing is as important as good writing, because in literature, the walls between people and cultures are broken down, and the things that plague us most - suspicion and fear of the other, and the tendency to see whole groups of people as objects, as monoliths of one cultural stereotype or another - are defeated. This work is not done as a job, ladies and gentlemen, it is done out of love for the art and the artists who brought it forth, and who still bring it forth to us, down the years and across ignorance and chaos and borderlines. ~ Richard Bausch

That *does* relieve my mind!'
'It might well - except that I fancy you don't care a straw how we may appear.'
'On the contrary! Think how much my credit would suffer!'
She laughed, but shook her head. 'You don't care for that either. Or - or for anything, perhaps.'
He was momentarily taken aback by this, but he replied without perceptible hesitation: 'Not profoundly.'
She frowned, turning it over in her mind. 'Well, I can understand that that must be very comfortable, for if you don't care for anybody or anything you can't be cast into dejection, or become sick with apprehension, or even get into high fidgets. On the other hand, I shouldn't think you could ever be *aux anges* either. It wouldn't do for me: it would be too flat! ~ Georgette Heyer

I have always tried to teach my players to be fighters. When I say that, I don't mean put up your dukes and get in a fistfight over something. I'm talking about facing adversity in your life. There is not a person alive who isn't going to have some awfully bad days in their lives. I tell my players that what I mean by fighting is when your house burns down, and your wife runs off with the drummer, and you've lost your job and all the odds are against you. What are you going to do? Most people just lay down and quit. Well, I want my people to fight back. ~ Bear Bryant

You're Savannah Dubrinsky." Gary breathed her name reverently. "My God, I should have guessed."
Gregori's entire demeanor changed, becoming all at once menacing and dangerous. His face was etched in stone, his mouth hard and faintly cruel. The hair on the back of Gary's neck literally stood up. He swallowed hard and instinctively moved a little distance from the woman. Not that he blamed the man, creature, whatever, but his reaction was more that of untamed beast than civilized man. Gary was taking no chances.
Savannah laughed softly. She leaned into the man despite Gregori's restraining arm. "He can read your mind," she reminded Gary softly, her breath swirling with tantalizing warmth over his neck.
He jumped away as if he'd been burned, his face flamed crimson, and he looked guiltily at Gregori.
Gregori's dark features relaxed. The hard edge to his mouth softened. "Do not worry, Gary, she is incorrigible. Even I have trouble with her.I cannot blame you for what I myself cannot control." His arm swept arond Savannah's small waist, and he tucked her beneath his shoulder.
Are you angry? The smile was fading from her eyes, her mouth.
Gregori tightened his hold on her when her step faltered. We can discuss this at home, cherie.You are already here;you may as well give the boy a thrill.But I warn you,not too big a thrill.
She relaxed her body into his.That quickly.That easily.As if she belonged, his other half.He was beginning to believe it migh ~ Christine Feehan

He thought of Tom dancing with the girl, and he was happy. Sleep came, finally, with the music swelling into the vacuum in his mind where there had been only that high, thin whining. The gramophone spun and he slept, with the letter still in his hand. He had kissed Duggan as he was dying. It had seemed the only thing to do. ~ Chris Cleave

Never let the state of waiting be in your mind.
Just do something else and do it by intention. ~ Toba Beta

There is something about my aura or essence, or whatever, that draws the ex-wife characters to me. I don't seek them out, but people tend to think of me for that particular archetype, or whatever you want to call it, and I don't mind it. I think there is a strength to it. ~ Natalie Zea

Indeed, there is an attack against things Christian in America. We see it in the movies, on TV, in the schools, in the universities, in the public arena, in the courts, and even within some church circles. ~ D. James Kennedy

The United States has experienced more than two centuries of political stability. When viewed against the background of world history, this is remarkable. The First Amendment has played a singularly important role. When citizens can openly criticize their government, changes come about through orderly political processes. When grievances exist, they must be aired, if not through the channels of public debate, then by riots in the streets. The First Amendment functions as a safety valve through which the pressures and frustrations of a heterogeneous society can be ventilated and defused. ~ Jacqueline R. Kanovitz