The easier it is to do something, the harder it is to change the way you do it.
The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.
Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
I get into a rut, unable to yank my mind out of it.
Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.
Narrow minds think nothing right that is above their own capacity.
The chief enemy of peace is the spirit of unreason itself: an inability to conceive alternatives, an unwillingness to reconsider old prejudices, to part with ideological obsessions, to entertain new ideas or to improve new plans.
At a certain age some people's minds close up; they live on their intellectual fat.
It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.
A narrow mind and a fat head invariably come on the same person.
My son, who's on the spectrum is a very rigid thinker. He needs clear-cut definitions of right and wrong. Anything hazy or gray confuses him. For instance, if I try to get him to see that a friend behaved badly, he'll often get upset with me because a friend is a 'good guy' by definition, in his book.
One of the frustrations of having a mind trained to think and consider possibilities was that it couldn't simply be stopped once engaged.
It is so much easier to rest contented with what we have already acquired than to change ever so slightly those routine but profound habits of thought and feeling which govern our life, and by which we live so blissfully. This mental inertia is, perhaps, our greatest enemy. Insidiously it leads us to assume that we can renew our lives without renewing our habits.
When we are constantly recreating our basic patterns of behavior and thought, we never have to leap into fresh air or onto fresh grass. Instead, we wrap ourselves in our own dark environment, where our only companion is the smell of our own sweat. In the cocoon, there is no dance, no walking or breathing. It is comfortable and sleepy, an intense and very familiar home.
There is a kink in my damned brain that prevents me from thinking as other people think.
It would be wrong of me to suppose that just because I can form private mental images, that everyone can. As Francis Galton and William James long ago showed, a small proportion of adults-and some of these extremely intelligent-are unable to form such visual images. Berkeley's point is that it would be equally arrogant for these non-thinkers or non-image formers to claim that everyone is like them in the relevant respect. The temptation to pontificate in that way reveals a narrowness and unwillingness to see the world from another perspective.
Trauma is nothing more than being stuck in what you believe.
Earthly minds, like mud walls, resist the strongest batteries; and though, perhaps, sometimes the force of a clear argument may make some impression, yet they nevertheless stand firm, keep out the enemy, truth, that would captivate or disturbe them.
There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.
The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.
It is almost as difficult to make a man unlearn his errors as his knowledge.
Sometimes we find that we like our thoughts so much that we don't want to let them go.
People on the autistic spectrum tend to get fixated on what they think.
Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like home.
Obsessional prohibitions are extremely liable to displacement. They extend from one object to another along whatever paths the context may provide, and this new object then becomes, to use the apt expression of one of my women patients, 'impossible' - till at last the whole world lies under an embargo of 'impossibility'.
