Mental Activity Quotes

Men have always been a prey to distractions, which arethe original sins of the mind; but never before today has an attempt been made to organize and exploit distractions, to make of them, because of their economic importance, the core and vital center of human life, to idealize them as the highest manifestations of mental activity. Ours is an age of systematized irrelevances, and the imbecile within us has become one of the Titans, upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the social and economic system

Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation... even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

For, as I think I have said, I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.

The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

For contemplation is both the highest form of activity (since the intellect is the highest thing in us, and the objects that it apprehends are the highest things that can be known), and also it is the most continuous, because we are more capable of continuous contemplation than we are of any practical activity.

But I'm thinking about 12 things at once, a hundred thousand times a day. Most people do, I would imagine.

When we make the cerebral state the beginning of an action, and in no sense the condition of a perception, we place the perceived images of things outside the image of our body, and thus replace perception within the things themselves.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

My brain's always working, and gears are turning 24/7. So I was trying to think of solutions.

Worry is just about the worst form of mental activity there is-next to hate, which is deeply self destructive. Worry is pointless. It is wasted mental energy. It also creates bio-chemical reactions which harm the body, producing everything from indigestion to coronary arrest, and a multitude of things in between.

You can’t get intelligence by sitting and saying nothing.

All mental hygiene is based on the core practice of doing nothing. Most of us are good at wasting time, staring at the wall while telling ourselves we should be working. We call this doing nothing, but our brains are furiously active. We think constantly, and our thinking is often rife with distress.

Science is, rightly, searching for drugs to arrest ageing or to slow the advance of dementia. But the evidence suggests that many of the most powerful factors determining how you age come from what you do, and what you do with others: whether you work, whether you play music, whether you have regular visitors.

Thinking is the most overrated human activity.

Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.

If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream.

... writing letters is thinking, just as talking to you is thinking.

Fundamental ideas are not a consequence of experience, but a result of the particular constitution and activity of the mind, which is independent of all experience in its origin, though constantly combined with experience in its exercise.

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.

Thinking has become a superfluous exercise... purely internal, without compelling force, more or less a game.

To an active mind, indolence is more painful than labor.

What is thinking? It is the activity of searching out what must be true, or cannot be true, in the light of the given facts or assumptions.

Thinking. A process by which I use my brain to make a rational decision.

But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.

My mind is always racing, and always going and always working, and it's a gift and a curse.