John Desmond Bernal Quotes

Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.

There are thoughts we must not think.

I have a very busy head. I have inside voices that I have learned to contain.

And if thought and emotion can persist in this way so long after the brain that sent them forth has crumpled into dust, how vitally important it must be to control their very birth in the heart, and guard them with the keenest possible restraint.

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off into all kinds of thoughts.

Meditation is difficult for many people because their thoughts are always on some distant object or place. One form of meditation is to label the thought as it appears and then choose to let it go.

Are we controlled by our thoughts, or are we controlling our thoughts?

We have to push aside what generally concerns us most in our thought life, namely, the content of our thoughts, and learn instead to make conscious use of the element of will in our thinking.

Racing thoughts was the biggest hurdle to consistent meditation for me. I could sit down, but then I was left with this interior world of thoughts.

Make a decision that from now on, your thoughts do not run you, you run your thoughts. From now on, your mind is not the captain of your ship, you are the captain of the ship, and your mind works for you.

To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise.

A theory that denies that thoughts can regulate actions does not lend itself readily to the explanation of complex human behavior.

You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That's the only thing you should be trying to control.

You either control your mind or it controls you.

Often we combat our evil thoughts most effectively if we absolutely refuse to allow them to be expressed in words.

Law of Attraction won't let you remove a thought. You cannot concentrate upon NOT thinking about something hard enough to stop thinking about it! For the more you decide you will not think about it, the more you think about it!...Think about that.

Some feel that you lose your independence if you don't let your mind just wander where it wants to, if you try to control it. But that is not the case. If your mind is proceeding in the correct way, one already has the correct opinion. But if your mind is proceeding in an incorrect way, then it's necessary, definitely, to exercise control.

The whole thing resolves itself into our mental ability to control our thought. The man who can do this can have what he wants, can do what he wishes and becomes what he wills.

The harder you tried not to think, the more you thought.

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

We are not responsible for every thought that goes wandering through our mind. We are, however, responsible for the ones we hold there. We're especially responsible for the one's we put there.

Any man who can't control his thoughts can't control his actions, and any man who can't control his actions isn't safe in society.

One who can control his thoughts has conquered himself.

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.