The Life Of The Mind Quotes

1. "You can, in short, lead the life of the mind, which is, despite some appalling frustrations, the happiest life on earth. And one day, in the thick of this, approaching some partial vision, you will (I swear) find yourself on the receiving end of - of all things - an "idea for a story," and you will, God save you, start thinking about writing some fiction of your own. Then you will understand, in what I fancy might be a blinding flash, that all this passionate thinking is what fiction is about, that all those other fiction writers started as you did, and are laborers in the same vineyard."
Author: Annie Dillard

2. "My father was a classic intellectual. From him I learned devotion, and I also learned about the life of the mind."
Author: Brian Dennehy

3. "All good things require effort. That which is worth having will cost part of your physical being, your intellectual power and your soul power. Let us ever keep in mind that life is largely what we make it."
Author: David O. McKay

4. "I cannot picture what the life of the spirit would have been without him. He found me when my mind and soul were hungry and thirsty, and he fed them till our last hour together. It is such comradeships, made of seeing and dreaming, and thinking and laughing together, that make one feel that for those who have shared them there can be no parting."
Author: Edith Wharton

5. "I did not realize that when money becomes a core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life of the mind will not be counted as good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left."
Author: Jeanette Winterson

6. "When I feel clumsy or lost, I remind myself that nature, including me, was created by a a far wiser mind than mine. There is something in the cosmos - God, Spirit, Consciousness, Life Itself, call It what you will - that created and orchestrates nature, and did a pretty good job of it. Nature might just know what It's doing. Even when I don't."
Author: Jeffrey R. Anderson

7. "Education is helping people understand something they don't already understand. Or, more accurately, education is helping people (young or old) learn how to get an understanding that they didn't already have. Education is cultivating the life of the mind so that it knows how to grow in true understanding. That impulse was unleashed by God's inspiring a book with complex demanding paragraphs in it."
Author: John Piper

8. "What is this all about,' asked Sai, but her mouth couldn't address her ear in the tumult; her mind couldn't talk to her heart. 'Shame on myself,' she said...Who was she...she with her self-importance, her demand for happiness, yelling it at fate, at the deaf heavens, screaming for her joy to be brought forth..?How dare...How dare you not...Why shouldn't I have...How dare...I deserve...Her small greedy soul...Her tantrums and fits...Her mean tears...Her crying, enough for all the sadness in the world, was only for herself. Life wasn't single in its purpose...or even its direction...The simplicity of what she'd been taught wouldn't hold. Never again could she think there was but one narrative and that this narrative belonged only to herself, that she might create her own tiny happiness and live safely within it."
Author: Kiran Desai

9. "All my life I've read that the life of the mind is preeminent, and that it can transcend all bodily degradation. But that's just not my experience. When your body has to deal all day with shit and string beans, your mind does too."
Author: Marilyn French

10. "Here was the Russia she'd loved since childhood, the dark, violent, passionate place where the life of the mind and spirit were as real as the life of the body."
Author: Natalie Standiford

11. "If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows."
Author: Niall Williams

12. "The romantics would call this a love story, the cynics would call it a tragedy. In my mind it's a little bit of both, and no matter how you choose to view it in the end, it does not change the fact that it involves a great deal of my life and the path I've chosen to follow."
Author: Nicholas Sparks

13. "I travelled the old road every day, I took my fruits to the market,my cattle to the meadows, I ferried my boat across the stream andall the ways were well known to me. One morning my basket was heavy with wares. Men were busy inthe fields, the pastures crowded with cattle; the breast of earthheaved with the mirth of ripening rice. Suddenly there was a tremor in the air, and the sky seemed tokiss me on my forehead. My mind started up like the morning out ofmist. I forgot to follow the track. I stepped a few paces from thepath, and my familiar world appeared strange to me, like a flowerI had only known in bud. My everyday wisdom was ashamed. I went astray in the fairylandof things. It was the best luck of my life that I lost my path thatmorning, and found my eternal childhood."
Author: Rabindranath Tagore

14. "I don't mind being the center of attention as a character but in real life it's not for me."
Author: Rachel Bilson

15. "Evasion of the unadorned immediacy of life is as deep-seated as it is relentless. Even with the ardent desire to be aware and alert in the present moment, the mind flings us into tawdry and tiresome elaborations of past and future. This craving to be otherwise, to be elsewhere, permeates the body, feeling, perceptions, will - consciousness itself. It is like the background radiation from the big bang of birth, the aftershock of having erupted into existence."
Author: Stephen Batchelor

16. "The first words that are read by seekers of enlightenment in the secret, gong-banging, yeti-haunted valleys near the hub of the world, are when they look into The Life of Wen the Eternally Surprised.The first question they ask is: 'Why was he eternally surprised?'And they are told: 'Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.'The first words read by the young Lu-Tze when he sought perplexity in the dark, teeming, rain-soaked city of Ankh-Morpork were: 'Rooms For Rent, Very Reasonable.' And he was glad of it."
Author: Terry Pratchett

The Life Of The Mind Quotes Pictures