The most distinctive mark of a cultured mind is the ability to take another’s point of view; to put one’s self in another’s place, and see life and its problems from a point of view different from one’s own. To be willing to test a new idea; to be able to live on the edge of difference in all matters intellectually; to examine without heat the burning question of the day; to have imaginative sympathy, openness and flexibility of mind, steadiness and poise of feeling, cool calmness of judgment, is to have culture. - A. H. R. Fairchild
The propensity to excessive simplification is indeed natural to the mind of man, since it is only by abstraction and generalisation, which necessarily imply the neglect of a multitude of particulars, that he can stretch his puny faculties so as to embrace a minute portion of the illimitable vastness of the universe. - James Frazer
Refuse to think in terms of this or that. All pain needs investigation. The mind is nothing else but the self. Assumption obscures reality without destroying it. All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is false.. Your being a person is due to the illusion of space and time. The mind creates time and space and takes its own creations for reality. - Unknown
Your unconscious mind is not a sink of horror and depravity. That's a Victorian notion, and a terrifically destructive one. It crippled most of the best minds of the nineteenth century, and hamstrung psychology all through the first half of the twentieth. Don't be afraid of your unconscious mind! It's not a black pit of nightmares. Nothing of the kind! It is the wellspring of health, imagination, creativity. What we call 'evil' is produced by civilization, its constraints and repressions, deforming the spontaneous, free self-expression of the personality. The aim of psychotherapy is precisely this, to remove these groundless fears and nightmares, to bring up what's unconscious into the light of rational consciousness, examine it objectively, and find that there is nothing to fear. - Ursula K. le Guin
The mind of man is a scene of perpetual instability and commotion, ruffled by every breeze of passion and agitated by every impulse of hope; it floats with giddy security on the ebullitions of fancy, and sinks with precipitation in the cavities of despair; it pursues with avidity the emotions of sense, and listens with rapture to the murmurs of restraint; it hears with pious reverence the counsels of reason, and follows with lucid submission the dictates of pleasure: always fickle and undetermined, it looks for quiet, sometimes in remonstrance, sometimes in acquiescence; it often mixes with confusion, that it may establish peace, and often regulates quietude by turbulent uproar. - Norman MacDonald
The mind, when compelled, by education or other circumstances, to receive irrational doctrines, has yet a power of keeping them, as it were, on its surface, of excluding them from its depths, of refusing to incorporate them with its own being; and when burdened with a mixed and incongruous system, it often discovers a sagacity which reminds us of the instinct of inferior animals, in selecting the healthful and nutritious portions, and in making them its daily food. - William E. Channing
The immortal mind, superior to his fate, amid the outrage of external things, firm as the solid base of this great world, rests on his own foundation. Blow, ye winds! Ye waves! ye thunders! roll your tempests on! Shake, ye old pillars of the marble sky! Till at its orbs and all its worlds of fire be loosen'd from their seats; yet still serene, the unconquer'd mind looks down upon the wreck; and ever stronger as the storms advance, firm through the closing ruin holds is way, when nature calls him to the destin'd goal. - Mark Akenside
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