Mental Life Quotes

English philosopher Bertrand Russell, another prominent twentieth-century pacifist, once used those medicinal facts about iodine to build a case against the existence of immortal souls. "The energy used in thinking seems to have a chemical origin ... ," he wrote. "For instance, a deficiency of iodine will turn a clever man into an idiot. Mental phenomena seem to be bound up with material structure." In other words, iodine made Russell realize that reason and emotions and memories depend on material conditions in the brain. He saw no way to separate the "soul" from the body, and concluded that the rich mental life of human beings, the source of all their glory and much of their woe, is chemistry through and through. ~ Sam Kean

I realized that if I had said to them, "You had that young man turned out of the carriage because he had a second-class ticket," they would have nodded and said, "Yes," and if I had gone on and said, "But you yourselves have only second-class tickets," they would not have seen that the second statement had any bearing on the first; and I cannot picture to myself the mental life of people who cannot perceive that connexion. ~ Rebecca West

Much of what we do arises from automatic programming that bypasses conscious awareness and may even run contrary to our intentions, as Dr. Schwartz points out:
The passive side of mental life, which is generated solely and completely by brain mechanisms, dominates the tone and tenor of our day-to-day, even our second-to-second experience. During the quotidian business of daily life, the brain does indeed operate very much as a machine does.
Decisions that we may believe to be freely made can arise from unconscious emotional drives or subliminal beliefs. They can be dictated by events of which we have no recollection. The stronger a person's automatic brain mechanisms and the weaker the parts of the brain that can impose conscious control, the less true freedom that person will be able to exercise in her life. In OCD, and in many other conditions, no matter how intelligent and well-meaning the individual, the malfunctioning brain circuitry may override rational judgment and intention. Almost any human being when overwhelmed by stress or powerful emotions, will act or react not from intention but from mechanisms that are set off deep in the brain, rather than being generated in the conscious and volitional segments of the cortex. When acting from a driven or triggered state, we are not free. ~ Gabor Mate

If Samkhya-Yoga philosophy does not explain the reason and origin of the strange partnership between the spirit and experience, at least tries to explain the nature of their association, to define the character of their mutual relations. These are not real relationships, in the true sense of the word, such as exist for example between external objects and perceptions. The true relations imply, in effect, change and plurality, however, here we have some rules essentially opposed to the nature of spirit.
"States of consciousness" are only products of prakriti and can have no kind of relation with Spirit the latter, by its very essence, being above all experience. However and for SamPhya and Yoga this is the key to the paradoxical situation the most subtle, most transparent part of mental life, that is, intelligence (buddhi) in its mode of pure luminosity (sattva), has a specific quality that of reflecting Spirit. Comprehension of the external world is possible only by virtue of this reflection of purusha in intelligence. But the Self is not corrupted by this reflection and does not lose its ontological modalities (impassibility, eternity, etc.). The Yoga-sutras (II, 20) say in substance: seeing (drashtri; i.e., purusha) is absolute consciousness ("sight par excellence") and, while remaining pure, it knows cognitions (it "looks at the ideas that are presented to it"). Vyasa interprets: Spirit is reflected in intelligence (buddhi), but is neither like it nor different from i ~ Mircea Eliade

There are manifold tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life. ~ Henri Bergson

It seems to me that this dialectic, this ambiguity, this contradiction of the clichés of our mental life and the images of lived life is really the subject of all my films. ~ Agnes Varda

But, mind you, it's like this; while you live your life, you are in some way an organic whole with all life. But once you start the mental life you pluck the apple. You've severed the connection between the apple and the tree: the organic connection. And if you've got nothing in your life but the mental life, then you yourself are a plucked apple ... you've fallen off the tree. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Mental life consists, according to the textbooks, of thought and feeling, according to the poets, of addressing an inner voice (or voices), and according to the dramatists, of internal monologues. In my experience however it consists mainly of intermittent silences, and humming. Humming accompanies habitual and semi-automatic activities, as well as stoppages. Humming accompanies a sort of incomplete concentration on oneself. Humming is characteristic of psychological states in which we are not exactly miserable, and states in which we are not exactly ecstatic. Which amounts I think to more or less always. ~ Miroslav Holub

Not purpose but chance is at the heart of mental life. ~ Boris Sidis

Memory is the scaffolding upon which all mental life is constructed. ~ Gerald Fischbach

Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception. ~ Marshall McLuhan

At the most basic level, therefore, secure attachments in both childhood and adulthood are established by two individual's sharing a nonverbal focus on the energy flow (emotional states) and a verbal focus on the information-processing aspects (representational processes of memory and narrative) of mental life. The matter of the mind matters for secure attachments. ~ Daniel J. Siegel

…much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health, you will be better armed against that unhappiness. ~ Sigmund Freud

The manner in which one single ray of light, one single precious hint, will clarify and energize the whole mental life of him who receives it, is among the most wonderful and heavenly of intellectual phenomena. ~ Arnold Bennett

Show me the artist anywhere who's had an utterly stable mental life, and I'll buy you hot dinners for the rest of your life. ~ Mark Haddon

The idea that our mental life is affected by hidden causes is a mainstay of psychology. ~ Gary Wolf

So a deeper look at which verbs participate in the locative alternation has forced us to take a deeper look at what compels the mind to construe physical events in certain ways. And at that depth we have discovered a new layer of concepts that the mind uses to organize mundane experience: concepts about substance, space, time, and force. These concepts encourage the mind to unite events that have nothing in common in terms of what they look like, smell like, or feel like, yet they obviously matter to the mind a great deal. They are so pervasive that some philosophers consider them to be the very scaffolding that organizes mental life, and in chapter 4 I will show how they saturate our science, our storytelling, our morals, our law, even our humor. ~ Steven Pinker

There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once. On one level we can be thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs, but deep within, behind the scenes at a profounder level we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship and a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings. ~ Thomas Raymond Kelly

[T]he psychoanalytic process should be understood as occurring between
subjects rather than within the individual. Mental life is seen from an intersubjective perspective. Although this perspective has transformed both our theory and our practice in important ways, such transformations create new problems. A theory in which the individual subject no longer reigns absolute must confront the difficulty each subject has in recognizing the other as an equivalent center of experience… ~ Jessica Benjamin

This time once again it has been my chief aim to make no sacrifice to an appearance of being simple, complete or rounded off, not to disguise problems and not to deny the existence of gaps and uncertainties. In no other scientific field would it be necessary to boast of such modest intentions. They are universally regarded as self-evident; the public expects nothing else. No reader of an account of astronomy will feel disappointed and contemptuous of the science if he is shown the frontiers at which our knowledge of the universe melts into haziness. Only in psychology is it otherwise. There mankind's constitutional unfitness for scientific research comes fully into the open. What people seem to demand of psychology is not progress in knowledge, but satisfactions of some other sort; every unsolved problem, every admitted uncertainty is made into a reproach against it.
Whoever cares for the science of mental life must accept these injustices along with it. ~ Sigmund Freud

Cell differentiation can turn neurons into everything from clocks that control circadian rhythms to photoreceptors that convert light into electrical-chemical impulses or decision makers that tally votes and decide courses of action. In the retina (often used as a case study because it can be directly and naturally stimulated), there are at least fifty different kinds of neurons specialized to different tasks, such as looking for motion, recognizing colors, detecting objects in low light, and measuring brightness and contrast. In the brain as a whole, there may be as many as 10,000 different kinds of neurons, each contributing to a different aspect of mental life. ~ Gary F. Marcus

Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else. ~ V.S. Ramachandran

Only a wall divided him from those happy young contemporaries of his with whom he shared a common mental life; men who had nothing to do from morning till night but to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. Only a wall - but what a wall! ~ Thomas Hardy

From the perspective of a general human being – a non-scientist, the most valuable element of the human mental life, is Emotion – a tiny portion of our conscious mental world. We humans as a species crave for emotional stimulation. And in many cases, as it happens, we are actually slaves to our emotions. ~ Abhijit Naskar

A purely mental life may be destructive if it leads us to substitute thought for life and ideas for actions. The activity proper to man is purely mental because man is not just a disembodied mind. Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts. ~ Thomas Merton

We avoid the familiar reproach that we base our constructions of mental life on pathological findings; for dreams are regular events in the life of a normal person, however much their characteristics may differ from the productions of our waking life. ~ Sigmund Freud

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large. ~ Wilhelm Wundt

Fantasies and wishes carry their own significant messages. ~ Sherry Turkle

Not that I wish by any means to deny, that the mental life of individuals and peoples is also in conformity with law, as is the object of philosophical, philological, historical, moral, and social sciences to establish. ~ Hermann Von Helmholtz

Mary was my first encounter with dissociative identity disorder (DID), which at that time was called multiple personality disorder. As dramatic as its symptoms are, the internal splitting and emergence of distinct identities experienced in DID represent only the extreme end of the spectrum of mental life. ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

I cannot climb out onto the nature of your mind. So how then do I know anything about your mental life? How do I know, for instance, that you see the colour blue the way that I do? Might it be that some of us feel pain more, but make less fuss about it, or that others feel pain less, but make more fuss? ~ Simon Blackburn

Psychology is the science of mental life ~ William James

Science can give mankind a better standard of living, better health and a better mental life, if mankind in turn gives science the sympathy and support so essential to its progress. ~ Vannevar Bush

I hope to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle. It is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind. It is, namely, a category-mistake. It represents the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type or category (or range of types or categories), when they actually belong to another r)The dogma is therefore a philosopher's myth. ~ Anonymous

The feeling of inferiority rules the mental life and can be clearly recognized in the sense of incompleteness and unfulfillment, and in the uninterrupted struggle both of individuals and humanity. ~ Alfred Adler

Are we open-minded enough to assume that other species have a mental life? Are we creative enough to investigate it? Can we tease apart the roles of attention, motivation, and cognition? Those three are involved in everything animals do; hence poor performance can be explained by any one of them. ~ Frans De Waal

Science has the capacity to show mankind the full development of the mental life. Spirituality has the capacity to show mankind the possibility and inevitability of the life beyond the mind, the supramental life. ~ Sri Chinmoy

Through the topic of motivation, we begin to see the mental trilogy in action. A mind is not, as cognitive science has traditionally suggested, just a thinking device. It's an integrated system that includes, in the broadest possible terms, synaptic networks devoted to cognitive, emotional, and motivational functions. More important, it involves interactions between networks involved in different aspects of mental life. ~ Joseph E. Ledoux

The other mind entity is what we call the impartial observer. This mind of present-moment awareness stands outside the preprogrammed physiological determinants and is alive to the present. It works through the brain but is not limited to the brain. It may be dormant in many of us, but it is never completely absent. It transcends the automatic functioning of past-conditioned brain circuits. 'In the end,...I conclude that there is no good evidence… that the brain alone can carry out the work that the mind does."
Knowing oneself comes from attending with compassionate curiosity to what is happening within.
Methods for gaining self-knowledge and self-mastery through conscious awareness strengthen the mind's capacity to act as its own impartial observer. Among the simplest and most skilful of the meditative techniques taught in many spiritual traditions is the disciplined practice of what Buddhists call 'bare attention'. Nietzsche called Buddha 'that profound physiologist' and his teachings less a religion than a 'kind of hygiene'...' Many of our automatic brain processes have to do with either wanting something or not wanting something else – very much the way a small child's mental life functions. We are forever desiring or longing, or judging and rejecting. Mental hygiene consists of noticing the ebb and flow of all those automatic grasping or rejecting impulses without being hooked by then. Bare attention is directed not only toward what's happening on the outside, ~ Gabor Mate

But greater than all these delights would be the possession of this wondrous library for my own use and pleasure. What more could my bibliophile's soul ask for? Here were marvels without end, treasures beyond knowing. You have seen the worst of me in these confessions. Here, then, let me throw into the opposite side of the balance, what I truly believe is the best of me: my devotion to the mental life, to those divine faculties of intellect and imagination which, when exercised to the utmost, can make gods of us all. ~ Michael Cox

The division of the psychical into what is conscious and what is unconscious is the fundamental premise of psycho-analysis; and it alone makes it possible for psycho-analysis to understand the pathological processes in mental life, which are as common as they are important, and to find a place for them in the framework of science. ~ Sigmund Freud

Seeing the world that, as a child, he had once thought so unimaginably vast, nearly limitless in size, reduced to a tiny ball, floating there, swallowed by the immensity of the universe, reminded Milo of how small he was, how minute a single life was - just ~ A.G. Riddle

I am here not to let you fall alone, suffocate alone, quit life easy. I'll fight the fate for you and with you. ~ Parul Wadhwa

The Old Ones knew that life is not rare, but precious; not fragile, but vulnerable. Life is as deep as the seas in which it was born, as strong as the mountains that give it shelter, as universal as the stars themselves. ~ Ben Bova

Be good and kind to yourself in silence when you are all alone, that is all that matters. ~ Debasish Mridha

For my life, I confess to you, feels to me today somewhat narrow and circumscribed. ~ Kenneth Grahame

Since I was trying so hard to make books lead my life, I didn't want to read them and then just put them back on the shelf and say, "good book," as if I was patting a good dog. I wanted books to change me, and I wanted to write books that would change others. ~ Jack Gantos

I don't really know,' I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true. It sounded true, and I recognized it, the way you recognize some nondescript person that's been hanging around your door for ages and then suddenly comes up and introduces himself as your real father and looks exactly like you, so you know he really is your father, and the person you thought all your life was your father is a sham. ~ Sylvia Plath

Of course I'd like to marry a practising Muslim, someone I can share my life and also my religion with, but I just haven't met the right man yet,' I told her. Fadwa was sympathetic and understood my dilemma. 'Concentrate on your relationship with God; purify yourself, your life and your intentions. Better your religion!' she recommended. 'If you are patient and steadfast, then you will be rewarded, insha' Allah. ~ Kristiane Backer

Only God can take our failures and turn them into victories. ~ Evinda Lepins

Art is to see beauty in everything you see everyday. ~ Prerak Trivedi

I never hated a man enough to give him his diamonds back. ~ Zsa Zsa Gabor

Lena knew she had spent too much of her life in a state of passive dread, just waiting for something bad to happen. In a life like that, relief was as close as you got to happiness. ~ Ann Brashares

The beauty and meaningfulness of an ordinary life. ~ Richard Alan Carter

Down the hall I could hear the thud of basketballs, the blare of the time-out horn, and the shouts of the crowd as the sports-beasts fought: Lisbon Greyhounds versus Jay Tigers.
Who can know when life hangs in the balance, or why? ~ Stephen King

This is a record I ended up having to make to get on to the next stage of my life. What I did was a desperate thing to do. I'm aware of the fact that it was irrational. I didn't mean to make it sound like it was my master plan. The tour had even been going all right, but I was just kind of fed up with the situation as it was, playing the same old rock and roll crap that everyone goes through, the general moaning when you really should be grateful that you don't work in the checkout counter at the grocery. ~ Luke Haines

Novelty is indeed necessary to preserve eagerness and alacrity; but art and nature have stores inexhaustible by human intellects, and every moment produces something new to him who has quickened his faculties by diligent observation. ~ Samuel Johnson

Realize that God uses the fires of life to purify your faith, to shape you into Christ's image, and to cause you to love Him ... even more! ~ Elizabeth George

Give me the supreme courage of love, this is my prayer - the courage to speak, to do,
to suffer at thy will, to leave all things or be left alone.
Strengthen me on errands of danger, honour me with pain, and help me climb to that difficult mood which sacrifices daily to thee.
Give me the supreme confidence of love, this is my prayer - the confidence that belongs to life in death, to victory in defeat, to the power hidden in frailest beauty, to that dignity in pain which accepts hurt but disdains to return it. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

...rationality can easily unveil the futility of life and lead to depression - as the stereotype of the extremely smart, but world-weary, educated man (often portrayed as a detective, philosopher, or doctor) suggests. As such, the rational worldview has its limits. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

Mrs Beaumont shrugged. 'Dougie travelled light in life,' she said. 'He knew it was people who were important. ~ Sara Sheridan

When we seek from Zen (or from any spiritual path) the fulfillment of our fantasies, we separate from the earth and sky, from our loved ones, from our aching backs and hearts, from the very soles of our feet. Such fantasies insulate us for a time; yet in ten thousand ways reality intrudes, and our lives become anxious scurrying, quiet desperation, confusing melodrama. ~ Charlotte Joko Beck

It could be enough, maybe, or at least a start, but the problem is that at night I tumble into dreams that aren't dreams at all. I tumble into memories and wake up aching for a dying world and a quiet, cold life that offered me nothing but sitting in a still room. ~ Elizabeth Scott

The beast exists because it is stronger than the thing that you call evolution. In it is some force of life, a demon, driving it through millions of centuries. It does not surrender so easily to weaklings like you and me. ~ Martin Berkeley

My father, my uncles, my aunts, from my father's side and my mother's side ... they were all professional musicians. My father was a concert master, he took me to a lot of rehearsals, concerts, performances, opera, ballet. For me, that was life. ~ Lalo Schifrin

Let us not become so cautious that we forget to live. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

When two persons are together, two of them must not whisper to each other, without letting the third hear; because it would hurt him ~ Anonymous

Without a clear destination in view, the challenges on the journey seem pointless. ~ Michael Hyatt

For Zen students a weed is a treasure. With this attitude, whatever you do, life becomes an art. ~ Shunryu Suzuki

The greatest thrill in my life was to represent the United States of America. ~ Madeleine Albright

We can only continue to promote invention, creativity and success by asking of ourselves, our situations and problems some key questions. What questions are you asking today? ~ Archibald Marwizi

Be humble!! Be wise!! Be wild!! Be love!! Be cute!! Be sexy!! Be sweet!! Be bold!! Okaaaayyyy... Be whatever you wanna be!! It's your life!! **Someone's opinion of you doesn't have to be your reality! (Les brown)** ~ Abhishek Kumar

No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves. ~ Stephen King

I can obviously relate to a character who is an artist, because the creative process is a big part of my life. ~ Paul Dano

When King Lear dies in Act V, do you know what Shakespeare has written? He's written "He dies." That's all, nothing more. No fanfare, no metaphor, no brilliant final words. The culmination of the most influential work of dramatic literature is "He dies." It takes Shakespeare, a genius, to come up with "He dies." And yet every time I read those two words, I find myself overwhelmed with dysphoria. And I know it's only natural to be sad, but not because of the words "He dies." but because of the life we saw prior to the words. ~ Suzanne Weyn

I've done much too far to be looking back. ~ Jordan Hoechlin

You cannot stop trusting people in life but I have learned to be a little bit careful. The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Half of life is lost in charming others.
The other half is lost in going through anxieties caused by others.
Leave this play. You have played enough. ~ Rumi

Life that did not yearn toward life was in fair way toward ceasing. ~ Jack London

The first Apple was just a culmination of my whole life. ~ Steve Wozniak

I am sure that the sad days and happenings were rare, and that I lived the joyous and careless life of other children; but just because the happy days were so habitual to me they made no impression upon my mind, and I can no longer recall them. ~ Pierre Loti

I'm as wrong about life as anyone, but I'm rarely wrong about art, she said. ~ Menna Van Praag

Music was a college attendee's survival essential; he'd need that to keep himself sane. ~ Kirsty Moseley

The laws of nature are not intelligent,' I replied. 'The force of gravity is not intelligent. Electricity is not intelligent. A savage looking at a television might assume that it's a sapient being, but we - '
'A sapient being? Looking at a television these days, the only possible assumption is that it's a loud-mouthed, hysterical madman suffering from progressive mental debility,' Anna Tikhonovna said derisively. ~ Sergei Lukyanenko

I am learning my way toward something that will make sense of my life, and I learn by going where I have to go, with whatever companions I am graced. ~ Dean Koontz

I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God's business. ~ Michael J. Fox

pride is not always the result of more success, but sometimes only an attempt to cover up the real situation ~ Kidicoyches

Every goodbye calls for preparation, but most times, life takes us by surprise. ~ Elisabetta Gnone