Mental Duality Quotes

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

I am mentally bifocal.

Sometimes the Warrior feels as if he were living two lives at once.

Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.

When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you.

Heaven and hell are not geographical. If you go in search of them you will never find them anywhere. They are within you, they are psychological. The mind is heaven, the mind is hell, and the mind has the capacity to become either. But people go on thinking everything is somewhere outside. We always go on looking for everything outside because to be inwards is very difficult. We are outgoing. If somebody says there is a god, we look at the sky. Somewhere, sitting there, will be the divine person.

We're all divided souls, we've got two natures in us, You measure schizophrenia not by the fact that you're divided but how well the divisions speak to one another.

When one is working out a problem ... life becomes duality. One's ego transacts the ordinary routine of things, as if the mind had an upper and lower story and the regular performance of the day's duties moved and motivated on the upper floor, while down below the all-absorbing problem toils silently, forcefully, toward its solution.

In one and the same human being there are cognitions that, however utterly dissimilar they are, yet have one and the same object,so that one can only conclude that there are different subjects in one and the same human being.

Know that you are your greatest enemy, but also your greatest friend.

Even in rapture, part of the mind watches.

The imagination conjures gifts; what the ungrateful, unsentimental part of the mind has to do is to unwrap them, find fault with them, see them for what they are and then alter them.

Weak thoughts, weak desires: he felt their force.

Mind training is based on the idea that two opposite mental factors cannot happen at the same time. You could go from love to hate. But you cannot, at the same time - toward the same object, the same person - want to harm and want to do good.

I look like a woman, but I think like a man.

There is always a part of my mind that is preparing for the worst, and another part of my mind that believes if I prepare enough for it, the worst won’t happen.

Dancing music, music sad, Both together, sane and mad.

Western man is schizophrenic.

If you embrace 'positive thinking,' you are - by definition - spurning 'negative thinking.' So it's as if you were on a teeter-totter and are trying desperately to put all your weight on one side - the 'positive thinking' side.

I am actually incredibly contented and jolly. But, and I have no idea why this is, I have a really strong empathy with all kinds of warped and destructive modes of thinking. I don't know why, but those things co-exist.

Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.

I have a combination of self-love and self-loathing, just like most people.

The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful. In some strange way, I have tried to do that with manic-depressive illness. It has been a fascinating, albeit deadly, enemy and companion; I have found it to be seductively complicated, a distillation both of what is finest in our natures, and of what is most dangerous.

For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out.

There are two contrary impulses which govern this man's brain-the one sane, and the other eccentric. They alternate at regular intervals.