Mind

"Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you."

"Today the child is much more directly thrown upon society, childhood is shortened, and the result is a human being cast in a different mold. As interiority has withered away, the joy of making personal decisions, of cultural development, and of the free exercise of imagination has gone with it. Other inclinations and goals mark the man of today: technological expertise, presence of mind, pleasure in the mastery of machinery, the need to be part of and to agree with the majority or some group which is chosen as a model and whose regulations replace individual judgment."

"Introspection is the process of self-examination. It occurs naturally over the life span, although some people are naturally more introspective than others. Some theorists in the field of psychology have historically seen introspection as a trait, an element of the personality itself'"

"It is through introspection that we obtain the self-knowledge allowing us to bring positive change to our lives. By engaging in it, you will be able to see when it is not the world that needs to reform but yourself."

"The best of [journeys] not only lead us outwards in space, but inwards as well. Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection."

"Learn to know thyself, it shall profit thee more than any craft."

"I can find Greece and Palestine and Italy and England and the Islands, the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras, in my own mind."

"The mind sent outside is the origination of suffering. The result of the mind sent outside is suffering. The mind seeing the mind is the path. The result of the mind seeing the mind is the cessation of suffering."

"Other men are lenses, through which we read our own minds."

"Your introspection may lead you to realize that you cannot take care of your problems on your own. This is not a defeat. This is introspection serving you well."

"The problem with introspection is that it has no end."

"Those who do not observe the movements of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy."

"Be vigilant in attending to yourself, … that you may set God before you at all times."

"In philosophical anthropology, … where the subject is man in his wholeness, the investigator cannot content himself … with considering man as another part of nature and with ignoring the fact that he, the investigator, is himself a man and experiences this humanity in his inner experience in a way that he simply cannot experience any part of nature."

"We are able to discern not only what we already are, but what we may become, to see in ourselves germs and promises of a growth to which no bounds can be set, to dart beyond what we have actually gained to the idea of perfection as the end of our being. It is by this self-comprehending power that we are distinguished from the brutes, which give no signs of looking into themselves. Without this there would be no self-culture, for we should not know the work to be done; and one reason why self-culture is so little proposed is, that so few penetrate into their own nature. To most men, their own spirits are shadowy, unreal, compared with what is outward. When they happen to cast a glance inward, they see there only a dark, vague chaos. They distinguish, perhaps, some violent passion, which has driven them to injurious excess; but their highest powers hardly attract a thought; and thus multitudes live and die as truly strangers to themselves as to countries of which they have heard the name, but which human foot has never trodden."

"There is no feeling so simple that it is not immediately complicated and distorted by introspection."

"Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history."

"The great duty ‘know thyself,’ which sounds so important, has always seemed to me suspect, like a trick of priests in secret conspiracy who would like to confuse man through unfulfillable demands and lead him away from his proper activity in the external world to a false interior contemplation. A man knows himself insofar as he knows the world, which he perceives only within himself, and himself only within it."

"The philosophy of the wisest man that ever existed, is mainly derived from the act of introspection."

"The unconscious mind is not blind, and its several levels sustain and nourish the intellect and the imagination. There exist interacting, cooperative levels of the healthy mind, still to be understood, toward which our first tentative approximations, "conscious" and "unconscious," only crudely point."

"Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals."

"The idea of the unconscious mental processes was, in many of its aspects, conceivable around 1700, topical around 1800, and became effective around 1900, thanks to the imaginative efforts of a large number of individuals of varied interests in many lands."

"Belief in a transcendental divinity arose from a misinterpretation of intimations from the less conscious levels of the mind. ...God is in the unconscious, is the unconscious, perhaps. ...Hinduism, recognizing the impersonality of the Divine Being, identified it with the deeper Self of man."

"Under normal conditions, every conflict stimulates the mind to activity for the purpose of creating a satisfactory solution. Usually—i.e., in the West—the conscious standpoint arbitrarily decides against the unconscious, since anything coming from inside suffers from the prejudice of being regarded as inferior or somehow wrong."

"The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied."

"The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not — which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams."

"It is only through the psyche that can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We are unable to distinguish whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are borderline concepts for transcendental contents. But empirically... there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness which manifests itself spontaneously in dreams, and a tendency, independent of the conscious will, to relate other archetypes to this center. Consequently, it does not seem improbable that the archetype produces a symbolism which has always characterized and expressed the Deity... The God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with a special content of it: namely the archetype of the self. It is this archetype from which we can no longer distinguish the God-image empirically."

"The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, "divine.""

"Nerds... the 'nerd' has never been precisely defined, thanks to the psychological complexity of the creature. The word has connotations of some level of intelligence. The typical nerd is a male with intelligence but no sense of giving it a manly face."

"That's the wonderful thing with nerds: they're enthusiasts. Not having a life means you get to love things with a passion and nobody bothers you about it."

"I get obsessed by little nerdy things in my corner that no one else is interested in."

"Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one."

"I was a nerd growing up, and I'm a little antisocial and awkward."

"Someone who doesn't take herself too seriously and can be a goofball. Because everyone's a nerd inside, I don't care how cool you are."

"I'm the biggest nerd - I love comic books and stuff like that!"

"Call me a nerd if you like, but I do find it hard to leave home without my laptop and a good book."

"Well, I think that everybody is kind of a nerd at heart."

"Being a nerd really pays off sometimes."

"A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour."

"Once you learn to do something consciously, you can move it into the subconscious and do it well. Everything you do well will be done subconsciously."

"The left ego is the master of consciousness; the right is master of the unconscious. And the relation between the two is not unlike the relation between Laurel and Hardy in the old movies. Ollie is the left brain, the boss. Stan takes his cues from Ollie. When Ollie is in a good mood, Stan is delighted. When Ollie is depressed, Stan is plunged into the depths of gloom. Stan is inclined to over-react. When Ollie wakes up on a wet Monday morning, he thinks: 'Damn, it's raining, and I've got a particularly dreary day in front of me . . .' Stan overhears this and sinks into depression. And -- since he controls the energy supply -- Ollie has that 'sinking feeling', and he feels drained of energy. This makes him feel worse than ever. As he walks out of the gate he bumps into a man who tells him to look where he is going, then trips over a crack in the pavement, then misses a bus just as he arrives at the stop, and thinks: 'This is going to be one of those days . . .' And again, Stan overhears, and feels worse than ever. by the end of the day, he may be feeling suicidal -- not because things have really been that bad, but because of a continual 'negative feedback' of gloom between the right and the left."

"You affect your subconscious mind by verbal repetition."

"Only one thing registers on the subconscious mind: repetitive application - practice. What you practice is what you manifest."

"Since so much of this music bubbled up urgently from my subconsious mind, I'm left to interpret it much like anyone else."

"When a man is ill it is not necessarily because he wants to be ill subconsciously. It is not necessarily because he is receiving some hidden psychological benefit, or because the illness fulfills some need. He is ill often - always in fact - because of a distortion that is occurring within the self, and materialized in physical form."

"Suggestibility varies as the amount of disaggregation, and inversely as the unification of consciousness."

"Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture. Never think of yourself as failing; never doubt the reality of the mental image."

"A leader or a man of action in a crisis almost always acts subconsciously and then thinks of the reasons for his action."

"Whatever we plant in our subconscious mind and nourish with repetition and emotion will one day become a reality."

"It is psychological law that whatever we desire to accomplish we must impress upon the subjective or subconscious mind."