Samuel Alexander Quotes

We cannot therefore say that mental acts contain a cognitive as well as a conative element.

Mental events, it is said, are not passive happenings but the acts of a subject.

There are two distinct classes of what are called thoughts: those that we produce in ourselves by reflection and the act of thinking and those that bolt into the mind of their own accord.

I want to know how the mind works.

Such being the nature of mental life, the business of psychology is primarily to describe in detail the various forms which attention or conation assumes upon the different levels of that life.

Thought is an errand boy, fear a mine of worries.

That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.

Independent of what is happening around you in the outside world, humans constantly have internal activity in the brain.

Everybody agrees that the brain is a remarkable machine. It's capable of generating an enormous number of phenomena, some of them very obvious and some of them less obvious. But I think that in the end there are going to be some very basic explanations for many things: emotions, awareness, consciousness, attention, perception, recognition.

It is amazing how many thoughts can race through your head in a minute.

One day we shall certainly 'reduce' thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motions in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?

The actuality of thought is life.

The brain is not, and cannot be, the sole or complete organ of thought and feeling.

The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.

Thinking very often resembles napping, but the intent is different. --Stephanie Plum

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

Every morning we awaken from sleep and from our dreams and enter the state we call wakefulness. A continuous stream of thoughts, most of them repetitive, characterizes the normal wakeful state.

What is essential in the life of a man of my kind is what he thinks and how he thinks, and not what he does or suffers.

Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. ... It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness and acts that are contrary to habit.

Memory marks the horizon of our consciousness, imagination its zenith.

Either one does not dream, or one does so interestingly. One should learn to spend one's waking life in the same way: not at all, or interestingly.

...forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation.

What you do comes from what you think.

That in the soul which is called the mind is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing.