Mental Agility Quotes

I've seen people severely messed up by their own knowledge of biases. They have more ammunition with which to argue against anything they don't like. And that problem - too much ready ammunition - is one of the primary ways that people with high mental agility end up stupid, in Stanovich's "dysrationalia" sense of stupidity. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

A programmable mind embraces mental agility, to practice "de-learning" and "relearning" all the time. ~ Pearl Zhu

The field attracted many extraordinary figures, not least the aforementioned Murchison, who spent the first thirty or so years of his life galloping after foxes, converting aeronautically challenged birds into puffs of drifting feathers with buckshot and showing no mental agility whatever beyond that needed to read The Times or play a hand of cards. ~ Bill Bryson

That is what I want our young nascent readers to become: expert, flexible code switchers -- between print and digital mediums now and later between and among the multiple future communication mediums....I conceptualize the initial development of learning to think in each medium as largely separated into distinct domains in the first school years, until a point in time when the particular characteristics of the two mediums are each well developed and internalized.

That is an essential point. I want the child to have parallel levels of fluency, if you will, in each medium, just as if he or she were similarly fluent in speaking Spanish and English. In this way the uniqueness of the cognitive processes honed by each medium would be there from the start. ~ Maryanne Wolf

It is a state of mind, a learning of the oneness of things, an appreciation for fundamental insights known in Eastern philosophy and religion as simply the Way [or Tao]. For Boyd, the Way is not an end but a process, a journey…The connections, the insights that flow from examining the world in different ways, from different perspectives, from routinely examining the opposite proposition, were what were important. The key is mental agility ~ Grant Tedrick Hammond

The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably - as it now appears to me - by those not exclusively dependent upon them. ~ Tony Judt

Becoming limitless involves mental agility; the ability to quickly grasp and incorporate new ideas and concepts with confidence. ~ Lorii Myers

Trey Gate's maternal grandmother, Adelle Maxwell, was also an important influence on him, encouraging him to read as much as possible, pushing him to excel in all that he did, challenging him to use his mind. They played card games together frequently, especially games like Concentration that required mental agility. ~ James Wallace

I'm much calmer as I get older, but I'm still just as capable of getting that strung-out stressed-out feeling of mental and spiritual unwellness. ~ Anne Lamott

Anthony Patch had ceased to be an individual of mental adventure, of curiosity, and had become an individual of bias and prejudice, with a longing to be emotionally undisturbed. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The most effective lie is always the closest to the truth. The closer the better. A dream is not true but is never a lie. There are various approaches for understanding dreams: as evidence of some deeper psychological truth, as alternate realities, as subtle yet surreal mental reprocessings of our daily lives, as experiences equally valid to those had while awake. Due to the acuity of their strangeness, dreams practically call out for interpretation. However, since we don't accurately know what consciousness is, since we don't know precisely what or how we experience being awake, why would we be able to know what happens when we dream? There are also various approaches one might use for understanding a lie. But one aspect generally agreed upon is that to tell the complete truth, and only the complete truth, at all times, is a disaster. There are different ways of being honest. ~ Jacob Wren

Her apartment in Stockholm might look as if a bomb had gone off in it, but mentally Salander was extremely well organised. ~ Stieg Larsson

There's memory clutter, which reminds you of an important person, achievement, or event from your past. I think memory clutter often gathers in the homes of people with some degree of depression. And then there's "I might need it one day clutter, in which people hang on to stuff in anticipation of an imagined future. Among these folks, I've noticed a recurring theme of anxiety...Maybe it's possible that the stuff we own and obsess over is the physical manifestation of the mental health issues that challenge our minds. --p29. ~ Peter Walsh

The great thing about reading diverse news from the fields of business, health, science, technology, politics, and more is that you automatically see patterns in the world and develop mental hooks upon which you can hang future knowledge. ~ Scott Adams

It's exhausting to fight a war inside your head every single day. Mental health issues are people's everyday lives. And, as a society, we need to accept that. ~ Fuad Alakbarov

The view that all mental processes are necessarily physical processes is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific fact. ~ Dalai Lama XIV

I prefer to fight a bigger guy. I don't like fighting smaller guys; they give me problems with their agility. ~ Tyson Fury

Mental pictures offer us an opportunity to practice new traits and attitudes, which otherwise we could not do. This is possible because again - your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and one that is vividly imagined. ~ Maxwell Maltz

A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call it a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reasons: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching. The only selfishness lies in ruining strangers' days by forcing 'em to witness a grotesqueness. So I'll make a thick turban from several towels to muffle the shot and soak up the blood, and do it in the bathtub, so it shouldn't stain any carpets. Last night I left a letter under the manager's day-office door - he'll find it at eight A.M. tomorrow - informing him of the change in my existential status, so with luck an innocent chambermaid will be spared an unpleasant surprise. See, I do think of the little people ~ David Mitchell

She was so shattered about what kind of man he was
brutal, tender, passionate. There was little doubt he had some mental disorder. ~ Margaret Way

Only love can bring us peace. And the experience of love is a choice we make, a mental decision to see love as the only real purpose and value in any situation. ~ Marianne Williamson

I made up 'Badlands'; anything I say, goes. I came to realize I was materializing a metaphor for my mental state. ~ Halsey

Hunger, thirst, cold, fatigue, your own physical and mental limitations - you will feel all of these. This teaches you about nature, more than that, you come face to face with yourself ~ Willi Unsoeld

…I call it a November-loneliness because there is a sort of demanding stillness in my heart and it, more than ever, inflames both my mental and psychological system. November never pauses, it listlessly seems to show off, don't you think so? Or, rather, it does pause but it is always a hellish pause… ~ Katherine Mansfield

Many struggles lay within my soul. I had many battles in my head, and when I tell you I had to work on myself...it wasn't easy."
~Love is respect ♥~ ~ Charlena E. Jackson

This tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness ~ Charles R. Swindoll

I think more like a quantum
Buddhist, in that there is a universal proto-conscious mind which we
access, and can influence us. But it actually exists at the
funda-mental level of the universe, at the Planck scale. ~ Stuart Hameroff

All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move toward rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold,or do not hold, is looked on as matter of indifference. They can me granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. ~ George Orwell

A powerful spiritual practice is consciously to allow the diminishment of ego when it happens without attempting to restore it. I recommend that you experiment with this from time to time. For example, when someone criticizes you, blames you, or calls you names, instead of immediately retaliating or defending yourself – do nothing. Allow the self-image to remain diminished and become alert to what that feels like deep inside you. For a few seconds, it may feel uncomfortable, as if you had shrunk in size. Then you may sense an inner speciousness that feels intensely alive. You haven't been diminished at all. In fact, you have expanded. You may then come to an amazing realization: When you are seemingly diminished in some way and remain in absolute non-reaction, not just externally but also internally, you realize that nothing real has been diminished, that through becoming "less," you become more. When you no longer defend or attempt to strengthen the form of yourself, you step out of identification with form, with mental self-image. Through becoming less (in the ego's perception), you in fact undergo an expansion and make room for Being to come forward. True power, who you are beyond form, can then shine through the apparently weakened form. This is what Jesus means when he says, "Deny yourself" or "Turn the other cheek. ~ Eckhart Tolle

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four people is suffering from a mental illness. Look at your 3 best friends. If they're ok, then it's you. ~ Rita Mae Brown

Theory is good for the intellect, but action is good for the soul. It's also good for your mental health, your physical health, and your pocketbook. ~ Robert Ringer

I've always been treated in a friendly manner, and even people I hardly know have rarely been rude or brusque or cold to me. In certain people that friendly manner, with my encouragement, might have been converted into love or affection, but I've never had the patience or mental concentration to even want to make the effort. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Don't complicate your mind. Flee from hate, mischief, and jealousy. ~ Bob Marley

Till your mental soil with determination. Fertilize your emotional soil with positive words. And plant the seed of your heart's desire with your disciplined efforts. ~ Iyanla Vanzant

When we are fully conscious and aware, we actually know when we are about to overreact. When we are mindful, we have the mental space and are aware of when our moods change. When we are mindful, we are aware of when our mental models are being challenged and when expectation does not meet with reality, which can trigger an emotional response. ~ Elizabeth Thornton

Any mental activity is easy if it need not take reality into account. ~ Marcel Proust

Integral wisdom involves a direct participation in every moment: the observer and the observed are dissolved in the light of pure awareness, and no mental concepts or attitudes are present to dim that light. ~ Laozi

I'm not an athlete; I'm a quarterback. I don't have great speed, and I can't throw 90 yards down the field. I win games because I've done the mental preparation. ~ Joey Harrington

The horror of the Pit lay in the emergence from it, with the return of her will, her caring, and her feeling of the need for meaning before the return of meaning itself. ~ Joanne Greenberg

Alcohol had a lot to do with it, too, and mental instability. All writers are narcissistic, manic-depressive drug addicts and alcoholics, and I am no exception. ~ T.C. Boyle

Shortly after I began work with Teresa, I acquired another MPD client, a supposedly schizophrenic young man I will call Tony. He called in to the clinic on a day I was on telephone duty, saying he was having flashbacks of "ritual abuse." I did not yet know what that was. Tony became my client. He could be quite entertaining. I have a vivid memory of him as a three-year-old, "Tiny Tony," standing on his head on my office couch, and running down the hall to try unsuccessfully to make it to the bathroom. He had in his head the entire rock band of Guns'n'Roses, and I got to know Axl, the band leader, quite well. I remember the time Tony was in hospital and I went to visit him; Axl popped out and said, "Remember, we're schizophrenic in here! ~ Alison Miller

Difficulty itself may be a path toward concentration - expended effort weaves us into a task, and successful engagement, however laborious, becomes also a labor of love. The work of writing brings replenishment even to the writer dealing with painful subjects or working out formal problems, and there are times when suffering's only open path is through an immersion in what is. The eighteenth-century Urdu poet Ghalib described the principle this way: 'For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river - / Unbearable pain becomes its own cure.'
"Difficulty then, whether of life or of craft, is not a hindrance to an artist. Sartre called genius 'not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.' Just as geological pressure transforms ocean sediment into limestone, the pressure of an artist's concentration goes into the making of any fully realized work. Much of beauty, both in art and in life, is a balancing of the lines of forward-flowing desire with those of resistance - a gnarled tree, the flow of a statue's draped cloth. Through such tensions, physical or mental, the world in which we exist becomes itself. Great art, we might say, is thought that has been concentrated in just this way: honed and shaped by a silky attention brought to bear on the recalcitrant matter of earth and of life. We seek in art the elusive intensity by which it knows. ~ Jane Hirshfield

If society is to progress on a truly humanistic basis, without being subject to mental epidemics and virulent social diseases to which the subconscious falls an easy victim, the personal consciousness of every individual should be cultivated to the highest degree possible. ~ Boris Sidis

I AM TRANSFORMING FOR THE BETTER. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

Common mental illness and unusual occupations aside, the tenants of Lingering Arms seem as typical as any residents of any building in any big city. And if you listened to their stories, you would find out that they do have many of the same difficulties, desires, and dreams as your average American . . . . . . And yet some the occupants of Lingering Arms will prove to be anything but average. ~ Aiden Bates

The issue of addiction has spread like wildfire and it is affecting every corner of this globe ~ Asa Don Brown

To say I woke up one day and reached a point where I no longer cared about the pains to befall me would be a lie. Nor can I say that I have ever fully forgiven those who willfully did me harm. On a deep, internal battlefield, I wrestle with the thought that I have been robbed of any chance of normalcy by the losses suffered. Therapists and gurus alike tell us to, "Let go or be dragged," as Zen proverb urges - to forgive for our own sake. But, in my experience, there is no letting go and forgiveness is transient. My inability to be free of it all isn't for lack of an evolved consciousness on my part. I've "done the work" to process it all; rather, it is my irreconcilable, inescapable humanity that causes to clutch the pain close to me. ~ L.M. Browning

Each time I experience the unseen wisdom of a person's system, it deepens my trust in the inner process unfolding and my awe at the way we are organized to be protected until the possibility of healing arrives. ~ Bonnie Badenoch

A successful day is one in which you have stayed in touch with Me, even if many things remain undone at the end of the day. Do not let your to-do list (written or mental) become an idol directing your life. ~ Sarah Young

The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others. ~ William Lyon Phelps

I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones. ~ Salman Rushdie

She didn't realize she was in a prison until she collided with the bars. ~ Joyce Rachelle

I'm a complete egomaniac. It makes me feel terrible to say [being interviewed] is hard. It's taxing in a way. Just 'cause it's a lot of mental energy just to keep focused. I actually think it's harder for journalists. ~ Rob Corddry

THIS ISN'T CHINA

Hold me close
and tell me what the world is like
I don't want to look outside
I want to depend on your eyes
and your lips
I don't want to feel anything
but your hand
on the old raw bumper
I don't want to feel anything else
If you love the dead rocks
and the huge rough pine trees
Ok I like them too
Tell me if the wind
makes a pretty sound
in the billion billion needles
I'll close my eyes and smile
Tell me if it's a good morning
or a clear morning
Tell me what the fuck kind of morning
it is
and I'll buy it
And get the dog
to stop whining and barking
This isn't China
nobody's going to eat it
It's just going to get fed and petted
Ok where were we?
Ok go if you must.
I'll create the cosmos
by myself
I'll let it all stick to me
every fucking pine needle
And I'll broadcast my affection
from this shaven dome
360 degrees
to all the dramatic vistas
to all the mists and snows
that moves across
the shining mountains
to the women bathing
in the stream
and combing their hair
on the roofs
to the voiceless ones
who have petitioned me
from their surprising silence
to the poor in the heart
(oh more and more to them)
to all the thought-forms
and leaking mental objects
that you get up here
at the end of your ghostly l ~ Leonard Cohen

A sort of halo, an occidental glow, came over life then. Troubles and other realities took on themselves a metaphysical impalpability, sinking to mere mental phenomena for serene contemplation, and no longer stood as pressing concretions which chafed body and soul. ~ Thomas Hardy

Higher states of awareness is a by product of mental development and conscious evolution. ~ Bryan Kest