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1 " What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them. "
― Arthur Schopenhauer
2 " People say, 'I'm going to sleep now,' as if it were nothing. But it's really a bizarre activity. 'For the next several hours, while the sun is gone, I'm going to become unconscious, temporarily losing command over everything I know and understand. When the sun returns, I will resume my life.'If you didn't know what sleep was, and you had only seen it in a science fiction movie, you would think it was weird and tell all your friends about the movie you'd seen.They had these people, you know? And they would walk around all day and be OK? And then, once a day, usually after dark, they would lie down on these special platforms and become unconscious. They would stop functioning almost completely, except deep in their minds they would have adventures and experiences that were completely impossible in real life. As they lay there, completely vulnerable to their enemies, their only movements were to occasionally shift from one position to another; or, if one of the 'mind adventures' got too real, they would sit up and scream and be glad they weren't unconscious anymore. Then they would drink a lot of coffee.'So, next time you see someone sleeping, make believe you're in a science fiction movie. And whisper, 'The creature is regenerating itself. "
― George Carlin , Brain Droppings
3 " Too many people get credit for being good, when they are only being passive. They are too often praised for being broadminded when they are so broadminded they can never make up their minds about anything. "
― Fulton J. Sheen
4 " Hence the sterile, uninspiring futility of a great many theoretical discussions of ethics, and the resentment which many people feel towards such discussions: moral principles remain in their minds as floating abstractions, offering them a goal they cannot grasp and demanding that they reshape their souls in its image, thus leaving them with a burden of undefinable moral guilt. "
― Ayn Rand , The Romantic Manifesto
5 " People who have a religion should be glad, for not everyone has the gift of believing in heavenly things. You don't necessarily even have to be afraid of punishment after death; purgatory, hell, and heaven are things that a lot of people can't accept, but still a religion, it doesn't matter which, keeps a person on the right path. It isn't the fear of God but the upholding of one's own honor and conscience. How noble and good everyone could be if, every evening before falling asleep, they were to recall to their minds the events of the while day and consider exactly what has been good and bad. Then, without realizing it you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you achieve quite a lot in the course of time. Anyone can do this, it costs nothing and is certainly very helpful. Whoever doesn't know it must learn and find by experience that: " A quiet conscience mades one strong! "
6 " They will set aside what they have believed about the world, divesting themselves of all preconceptions, all judgments.... They will do it, then they will send their minds out to seek the truth. "
7 " Personally, I always wondered about authors and celebrities who loudly declared there was no God. It was usually when they were healthy and popular and being listened to by crowds. What happens, I wondered, in the quiet moments before death? By then, they have lost the stage, the world has moved on. If suddenly, in their last gasping moments, through fear, a vision, a late enlightenment, they change their minds about God, who would know? "
― Mitch Albom , Have a Little Faith: a True Story
8 " In my hands is power. The power to hear or to destroy. To grant life or to cause death. I revere this gift, have honed it over time an art as magnificent and awesome as any painting in the Louvre. I an art, I am science. In all ways that matter, I am God.God must be ruthless and far-sighted. God studies his creations and selects. The best of these creations must be cherished, protected, sustained. Greatness rewards perfection.Yet even the flawed have purpose. A wise God experiment, considers, uses what comes into his hands and forges wonders. Yes, often without mercy, often with a violence the ordinary condemn. We who hold power cannot be detracted by the condemnations of the ordinary, by the petty and pitiful laws of simple man. They are blind, their minds are closed with fear-fear of pain, fear of death. They are too limited to comprehend that death can be conquered. I have nearly done so. If my work was discovered, they, with their foolish laws and attitudes, would damn me.When my work is complete, they will worship me. "
― J.D. Robb , Conspiracy in Death (In Death, #8)
9 " There is a higher form of hierarchy and that is the hierarchy of the spirit. When I stand in front of a person, I stand in front of a soul and I have met magnificent souls in bodies possessing no money, as well as parched and shallow souls in bodies bathed in riches. In the same light, I have met magnificent souls in bodies bathed in wealth, as well as parched and shallow souls in bodies that are impoverished. I am tired of people busying their minds with hierarchy based upon money, because this form of hierarchy is primitive; meanwhile there is an altogether higher form of hierarchy that is of the soul. As you judge man and woman based upon their riches, I laugh at your primitive form of judgment! When I stand in front of a human, I stand in front of a soul. "
― C. JoyBell C.
10 " Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be. "
― Abraham Lincoln
11 " Children are happy because they don't have a file in their minds called " All the Things That Could Go Wrong. "
12 " If the thing they were fighting for was important enough to die for then it was also important enough for them to be thinking about it in the last minutes of their lives. That stood to reason. Life is awfully important so if you've given it away you'd ought to think with all your mind in the last moments of your life about the thing you traded it for. So did all those kids die thinking of democracy and freedom and liberty and honor and the safety of the home and the stars and stripes forever? You're goddamn right they didn't.They died crying in their minds like little babies. They forgot the thing they were fighting for the things they were dying for. They thought about things a man can understand. They died yearning for the face of a friend. They died whimpering for the voice of a mother a father a wife a child They died with their hearts sick for one more look at the place where they were born please god just one more look. They died moaning and sighing for life. They knew what was important They knew that life was everything and they died with screams and sobs. They died with only one thought in their minds and that was I want to live I want to live I want to live.He ought to know. He was the nearest thing to a dead man on earth. "
― Dalton Trumbo , Johnny Got His Gun
13 " O I never thought that joys would run away from boys,Or that boys would change their minds and forsake such summer joys;But alack I never dreamed that the world had other toys "
― John Clare , Poems Chiefly from Manuscript
14 " Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment. "
― Mary Gaitskill
15 " There is a power that can be created out of pent-up indignation, courage, and the inspiration of a common cause, and that if enough people put their minds and bodies into that cause, they can win. It is a phenomenon recorded again and against in the history of popular movements against injustice all over the world. "
― Howard Zinn , You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
16 " In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. "
― Carl Sagan
17 " They had never previously been obliged to engage in such mental effort, and it gave them headaches. However, although the aim of their quest forever eluded them, they ended up finding its outline. If not the thing itself, then at least its shadow.They debated at length on all that referred to it and, to their great surprise, realised that they were already perfectly aware of what they had been looking for. They had always been privy to the main point, the first principle, of the pyramid's raison-d'être, except that it had lain in their minds in a pre-verbal, indeed in an unthinking state. The papyri of the archives had only draped it in words and in meaning. Insofar as a shadow can be draped. "
18 " An education is truly “fitted for freedom” only if it is such as to produce free citizens, citizens who are free not because of wealth or birth, but because they can call their minds their own. Male and female, slave-born and freeborn, rich and poor, they have looked into themselves and developed the ability to separate mere habit and convention from what they can defend by argument. They have ownership of their own thought and speech, and this imparts to them a dignity that is far beyond the outer dignity of class and rank. "
― Martha C. Nussbaum
19 " I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. "
― Henry David Thoreau , Walden
20 " Its only by educating the youth to challenge you that you remove the chains on their minds that you have placed thereRjS "
