Walter de La Mare Quotes

Observe yourself as you go through a typical day. Stuff happens to you. As it does, you immediately judge it and label it. Dozens of times. Hundreds of times. So often that you no longer recognize that you're doing it. It is a deep-seated habit.

We are all prisoners of our past. It is hard to think of things except in the way we have always thought of them. But that solves no problems and seldom changes anything.

It's the way the human brain works: when enough events occur in a pattern, we stop thinking and go into macro mode.

Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.

The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.

If you allow your perceptions to be dominated by a status-quo perspective these thought forms create a network of status-quo mental habit patterns.

The way you think either expresses or undermines faith.

The stream of thinking has enormous momentum that can easily drag you along with it. Every thought pretends that it matters so much.

Cliché activates the comfortable mental laziness, we sort of revert to the domain of the already-familiar, what we have already imagined so that it doesn't seem that bad.

Life-complication Theory: Given a choice between an easy solution and a complicated one, the loser will usually opt to travel the complicated path. Don't ignore a solution just because it's simple!

Dialogue is a space where we may see the assumptions which lay beneath the surface of our thoughts, assumptions which drive us, assumptions around which we build organizations, create economies, form nations and religions. These assumptions become habitual, mental habits that drive us, confuse us and prevent our responding intelligently to the challenges we face every day.

To do things today exactly the way you did them yesterday saves thinking.

Just as a pebble thrown into the water creates ripples, so our thoughts create similar effects on our palms.

Whatever a person frequently thinks and reflects on, that will become the inclination of their mind.

It's very difficult when you have learned something a certain way. Not only your mind absorbs it; your eyes also are trained to see in a certain way because eyes are only as good as you've been trained to see.

Old habits are hard to forget, and old fears are habits.

We are constantly misled by the ease with which our minds fall into the ruts of one or two experiences

…the majority of men do not think in order to know the truth, but in order to assure themselves that the life which they lead, and which is agreeable and habitual to them, is the one which coincides with the truth.

Meditation may also be thought of as a technique by which we diminish the force of old thought habits and develop new ones.

Einstein says common sense is just habit of thought. It's how we're used to thinking about things, but a lot of the time it just gets in the way.

Extreme skepticism and extreme gullibility are two equal ways of not having to think at all. And I don't think I'm the first to say that.

The mind does not easily unlearn what it has been long in learning.

We continue to think of new things in old ways.

The key to all fanatical beliefs is that they are self-confirming....(some beliefs are) fanatical not because they are "false", but because they are expressed in such a way that they can never be shown to be false.

As you think, so you become.....Our busy minds are forever jumping to conclusions, manufacturing and interpreting signs that aren't there.