Spacious Mind Quotes

Om meditation makes the mind spacious. It gives the freedom for focus and divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is the center of human creativity. ~ Amit Ray

The leading error of the human mind, - the bane of human happiness - the perverter of human virtue ... is Religion - that dark coinage of trembling ignorance! It is Religion - that poisoner of human felicity! It is Religion - that blind guide of human reason! It is Religion - that dethroner of human virtue! which lies at the root of all the evil and all the misery that pervade the world! ~ Frances Wright

I will be led and taught of the Holy Spirit. God desires full development, use and activity of our faculties. The Holy Spirit can and will guide me in direct proportion to the time and effort I will expend to know and do the will of God. I must read the Bible to know God's will. At every point I will obey and do I will die to self. I will begin to ask God to put me in a service of constant circumstances where to live Christ I must die to self. I will be alive unto God. That I may learn to love Him with my heart, mind, soul, and body. ~ Roger Youderian

The human mind is indeed a cave swarming with strange forms of life, most of them unconscious and unilluminated. Unless we can understand something as to how the motives that issue from this obscurity are generated, we can hardly hope to foresee or control them. ~ Charles Horton Cooley

One part of him recoiled in instinctive horror at the daily waste, the inundation of destruction and death that inexorably assaulted the mind and heart; once again he saw the faculty depleted, he saw the haunted looks upon those who remained behind, and saw in those looks the slow death of the heart, the bitter attrition of feeling and care. ~ John Edward Williams

You'd better take time for 'em, honey, otherwise you'll never grow. You'll be the same at sixty as you are now - then you'll be a case and not my niece. You have a tendency not to give anybody elbow room in your mind for their ideas, no matter how silly you think they are. ~ Harper Lee

I think the best life would be one that's lived off the grid. No bills, your name in no government databases. No real proof you're even who you say you are, aside from, you know, being who you say you are. I don't mean living in a mountain hut with solar power and drinking well water. I think nature's beautiful and all, but I don't have any desire to live in it. I need to live in a city. I need pay as you go cell phones in fake names, wireless access stolen or borrowed from coffee shops and people using old or no encryption on their home networks. Taking knife fighting classes on the weekend! Learning Cantonese and Hindi and how to pick locks. Getting all sorts of skills so that when your mind starts going, and you're a crazy raving bum, at least you're picking their pockets while raving in a foreign language at smug college kids on the street. At least you're always gonna be able to eat. ~ Joey Comeau

Taste, if it mean anything but a paltry connoisseurship, must mean a general susceptibility to truth and nobleness, a sense to discern, and a heart to love and reverence all beauty, order, goodness, wheresoever, or in whatsoever forms and accompaniments they are to be seen. This surely implies, as its chief condition, not any given external rank or situation, but a finely-gifted mind, purified into harmony with itself, into keenness and justness of vision; above all, kindled into love and generous admiration. ~ Thomas Carlyle

I don't know about you driving. What if your beast comes out? I don't think he's got a driver's permit." In a weird voice, she said, "He don't even have his license, Lisa."
"Who's Lisa?"
She blinked at him. "Weird Science? Never mind, crypt keeper. I'll shoot you a YouTube sometime, through this thing we youngsters like to call 'electronic mail. ~ Kresley Cole

The tantric path involves taking the mind and directing it beyond the senses. ~ Frederick Lenz

Form is solidified energy; energy is an expression of mind; mind is the covered mirror of Eternity; and Eternity is Truth that has thrown off the mask of mind. ~ Meher Baba

And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire - and it would come to absolutely the same thing. ~ Albert Camus

Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth
penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told. ~ Joseph Campbell

The things of God are of great import; and time, and experience,and careful, and ponderous, and solemn thoughts can only find them out. Thy mind, oh man, if thou wilt lead a man unto salvation, must stretch as high as the utmost heavens, and search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanses of eternity; thou must commune with God! ~ Joseph Smith Jr.

Being open is happiness and being closed is sadness. So free your mind from the prison of binding ideas and thoughts. ~ Debasish Mridha

Hume emphasized that the expectation of one thing following another does not lie in the things themselves, but in our mind. And expectation, as we have seen, is associated with habit. Going back to the child again, it would not have stared in amazement if when one billiard ball struck the other, both had remained perfectly motionless. When we speak of the 'laws of nature' or of 'cause and effect,' we are actually speaking of what we expect, rather than what is 'reasonable.' The laws of nature are neither reasonable nor unreasonable, they simply are. The expectation that the white billiard ball will move when it is struck by the black billiard ball is therefore not innate. We are not born with a set of expectations as to what the world is like or how things in the world behave. The world is like it is, and it's something we get to know ~ Jostein Gaarder

We live in worlds that we have forged and composed. It's much more true than any of the species that you see. I mean, it seems to me that one of the most distinctive features of human intelligence is the capacity to imagine, to project out of our own immediate circumstances and to bring to mind things that aren't present here and now. ~ Ken Robinson

Doubt springs from the mind; faith is the daughter of the soul. ~ Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

The GPS unit became almost equally obstreperous, though, over Richard's unauthorized route change, until they finally passed over some invisible cybernetic watershed between two possible ways of getting to their destination, and it changed its fickle little mind and began calmly telling him which way to proceed as if this had been its idea all along. ~ Neal Stephenson

In short, every secret of a writer's
soul, every experience of his life,
every quality of his mind is written
large in his works, yet we require critics
to explain the one and biographers to
expound the other.

That time hangs heavy on people's
hands is the only explanation of the
monstrous growth. ~ Virginia Woolf

What will the creature made all of sea-drift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking? His ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

At the very beginning of meditation, attempts to focus attention on the intended meditation object cannot easily be separated from the coarse content of the mind, mostly elaborate thinking. The beginner easily confuses attention with thinking. Since attention is confounded with thinking in these early stages, they are referred to as contemplation (bsam gtan), not as formal meditation (sgom ba). Nevertheless the attempt to isolate the act of focusing attention from the background of elaborate thinking does produce a certain benefit with practice. From the perspective of mind, the benefit is that the mind stays on its intended object, at least somewhat. From the perspective of the mind's events, thinking becomes less elaborate - that is, it becomes a bit calmer. ~ Daniel P. Brown

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear. ~ William Blake

I suppose it's true that most great television, literature, and other forms of high art (and basic cable) benefit from a little hindsight. 'M.A.S.H.' comes to mind. So does 'The Iliad.' ~ Kevin Bleyer

All his plans were suddenly overthrown, and the existence, so elaborately pictured, was no more than a dream which would never be realized. He was free once more. Free! He need give up none of his projects, and life still was in his hands for him to do what he liked with. He felt no exhiliration, but only dismay. His heart sank. The future stretched out before him in desolate emptiness. It was as though he had sailed for many years over a great waste of waters, with peril and privation, and at last had come upon a fair haven, but as he was about to enter, some contrary wind had arisen and drove him out again into the open sea; and because he had let his mind dwell on these meads and pleasant woods of the land, the vast deserts of the ocean filled him with anguish. He could not confront again the loneliness and the tempest. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

If you don't know by now, you own me, heart, mind, body, and soul ~ Mary Robinette Kowal

As his older sister, it was my job to lie to him in the name of easing his troubled mind. ~ Jennifer Bosworth

At least 600,000 men died in the Civil War. Major battles numbered the dead in the thousands; even minor skirmishes killed hundreds...Then why study the death of thirteen men?... Mass death numbs the mind and heart as it numbers its vast toll. Relief from the horror is less possible when we watch old Joe Woods and thirteen-year-old David Shelton plead for life - and then die. ~ Phillip Shaw Pauadan

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. ~ Romans 12 2 NIV Translation.

It was six men of Hindustan To learning much inclined, Who went to see the Elephant (Though all of them were blind) That each by observation Might satisfy the mind. ~ John Godfrey Saxe

There are so many wonderful places created in my mind simply from the books I have read, I have been transported to some unforgettable, magic places but there are so many more I wish to visit and so little time that I fear I never will. ~ Roxie Hibberd (Smith ) ME

The Dantean conceptions of Inferno were childish and unworthy of the divine imagination: fire and torture. Boredom is much more subtle. The inner torture of a mind unable to escape itself in any way, condemned to fester in its own exuding mental pus for all time, is much more fitting. ~ Isaac Asimov

That smell - cigarette - it always made me think of him. He smoked his cigarette. I drove. I didn't mind the silence and the desert and the cloudless sky. What did words matter to a desert? ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz

When I close my eyes to see, to hear, to smell, to touch a country I have known, I feel my body shake and fill with joy as if a beloved person had come near me.

A rabbi was once asked the following question: 'When you say that the Jews should return to Palestine, you mean, surely, the heavenly, the immaterial, the spiritual Palestine, our true homeland?' The rabbi jabbed his staff into the ground in wrath and shouted, 'No! I want the Palestine down here, the one you can touch with your hands, with its stones, its thorns and its mud!'

Neither am I nourished by fleshless, abstract memories. If I expected my mind to distill from a turbid host of bodily joys and bitternesses an immaterial, crystal-clear thought, I would die of hunger. When I close my eyes in order to enjoy a country again, my five senses, the five mouth-filled tentacles of my body, pounce upon it and bring it to me. Colors, fruits, women. The smells of orchards, of filthy narrow alleys, of armpits. Endless snows with blue, glittering reflections. Scorching, wavy deserts of sand shimmering under the hot sun. Tears, cries, songs, distant bells of mules, camels or troikas. The acrid, nauseating stench of some Mongolian cities will never leave my nostrils. And I will eternally hold in my hands – eternally, that is, until my hands rot – the melons of Bukhara, the watermelons of the Volga, the cool, dainty hand of a Japanese girl…

For a time, in my early youth, I struggled to nourish my ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Adoption, I was to learn although not immediately, is hard to get right.
As a concept, even what was then its most widely approved narrative carried bad news: if someone "chose" you, what does that tell you?
Doesn't it tell you that you were available to be "chosen"?
Doesn't it tell you, in the end, that there are only two people in the world?
The ones who "chose" you?
And the other who didn't?
Are we beginning to see how the word "abandonment" might enter the picture? Might we not make efforts to avoid such abandonment? Might not such efforts be characterized as "frantic"? Do we want to ask ourselves what follows? Do we need to ask ourselves what words come next to mind? Isn't one of those words "fear"? Isn't another of those words "anxiety"? ~ Joan Didion

When we discover the secret of being inwardly at worship while outwardly at work, we find that the soul's silence brings us to God and God to us. Silence takes us beyond the limits of consciousness and into the heart and mind and will of God. ~ J. Brent Bill

Name your intention. ~ Patti Digh

They're the ones I can't stand to look at, although on occasion I still fail. I deliberately seek out the colors to keep my mind off them, but now and then, I witness the ones who are left behind, crumbling among the jigsaw puzzle of realization, despair, and surprise. They have punctured hearts. They have beaten lungs. ~ Markus Zusak

Oh, wondrous power! how little understood, Entrusted to the mother's mind alone, To fashion genius, form the soul for good, Inspire a West, or train a Washington. ~ Sarah Josepha Hale

Whether that lady's gentle mind,
No longer with the form combined
Which scattered love, as stars do light,
Found sadness where it left delight,

I dare not guess; but in this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,

It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.

That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odors there,
In truth have never passed away:
'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they.

For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death or change: their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.

(--Conclusion, Autumn - A Dirge) ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley