Nicholas Sparks Quotes

If we are to use our minds rightly, we must live in an attitude of constant openness and learning.

A liberal mind is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything.

My brain is open.

As for my own views, they've of course evolved over the years. This conception of 'renouncing beliefs' is very odd, as if we're in some kind of religious cult. I 'renounce beliefs' practically every time I think about the topics or find out what someone else is thinking.

I've learned never to close my mind to an idea simply because it seems miraculous.

Minds, like parachutes, only function when they are open.

I am simply in favor of intellectual hospitality-that is all. You come to me with a new idea. I invite you into the house. Let us see what you have. Let us talk it over. If I do not like your thought, I will bid it a polite "good day." If I do like it, I will say: "Sit down; stay with me, and become a part of the intellectual wealth of my world."

I like friends who have independent minds because they tend to make you see problems from all angles.

I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind.

Continually challenge and be willing to amend your best loved ideas.

The mind becomes withered, stagnant, narrow and closed unless it searches for new ideas.

Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas.

His was not a small mind bothered by logic and consistency.

No one ever died from an open mind.

I have never had much trouble simultaneously entertaining diametrically opposed propositions, and welcome the possibility that this is not because I have one mind and am out of it, but because I have lots of them, all beavering away on their own.

The smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.

A liberally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear.

It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it.

It is well for people who think, to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean.

The critical mind is the creative mind.

That is the trouble with many inventors; they lack patience. They lack the willingness to work a thing out slowly and clearly and sharply in their mind, so that they can actually "feel it work." They want to try their first idea right off; and the result is they use up lots of money and lots of good material, only to find eventually that they are working in the wrong direction. We all make mistakes, and it is better to make them before we begin.

I've come up with my own cure for a closed mind: try it once, and see.

One of the difficulties of politics is that politicians are shocked by those who are really prepared to let their thinking reach any conclusion. Political thinking consists in deciding upon the conclusion first and then finding good arguments for it. An open mind is considered irresponsible- and perhaps it really is.

The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities.

The stupidest person in the room might have the best idea.