Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

You collect as much information as you can and then you put it into the mulberry of your mind and hope that you come up with a decent wine. Sometimes you do; sometimes you don't.

The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.

The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests.

Every second of every day, our senses bring in way too much data than we can possibly process in our brains.

Contemplation is to knowledge what digestion is to food - the way to get life out of it

Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.

Your mind's always juggling, isn't it?-mirrors, torches, plates.

Superfluous advice is not retained by the full mind.

The mind which is most capable of receiving impressions is very often the least capable of drawing conclusions.

The mind of man is more intuitive than logical, and comprehends more than it can coordinate.

Knowledge exists in minds, not in books. Before what has been found can be used by practitioners, someone must organize it, integrate it, extract the message.

The mind Is so hospitable, taking in everything Like boarders, and you don't see until It's all over how little there was to learn Once the stench of knowledge has dissipated.

The human mind is an organ for the discovery of truths rather than of falsehoods.

When the mind grapples with a great and intricate problem, it makes its advances step by step, with but little realization of the gains it has made, until suddenly, with an effect of abrupt illumination, it realizes its victory.

There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem. It makes sense in my own mind, but I'm trying to figure out a way to articulate it... It's like looking at a painting: you're able to take in the totality of the work all at once, and so processing whatever information that painting is giving you is almost secondary to simply apprehending what's in front of you.

How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?

What men need is, as much knowledge as they can assimilate and organize into a basis for action; give them more and it may become injurious. One knows people who are as heavy and stupid from undigested learning .

All the resources we need are in the mind.

Acts of the devil revealed and reveled, designed to recline the mind to lower level.

Your mind and a computer have one thing in common: neither of them know the difference between the truth... and what you tell it.

The human mind thinks but to complicate. As soon as one problem is solved, that solution introduces new complications, other problems that perhaps did not exist before. That was one of my great troubles when I was younger, I invented many things that were very fine, but always I was getting into complications. I have had to work very hard to overcome that.

There are three kinds of minds: first those that attain insight and understanding of things by their own means, then those that recognize what is right when others explain it to them, and finally those that are capable of neither one nor the other.

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Even if your body doesn't work the way it used to, the heart and the mind and the spirit are not diminished.