Zhuangzi Quotes

Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself, and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know things in their reality; for nothing comes to us that is not altered and falsified by our Senses. When the compass, the square, and the rule are untrue, all the calculations drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are of necessity also defective and out of plumb. The uncertainty of our senses renders uncertain everything that they produce.

You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.

The fact is that people would rather cling when they're afraid of something to a priori beliefs than rather open their minds about it.

All we can go on is what we think, how we see the world. If you can't trust your own mind what can you trust?

Smallness of mind is the cause of stubbornness, and we do not credit readily what is beyond our view.

All too often, when it comes to our own minds, we are surprisingly mindless. We sail on, blithely unaware of how much we are missing, of how little we grasp of our own thought process - and how much better we could be if only we'd taken the time to understand and to reflect.

There is no order of things except in the human mind.

Everything that we see in our daily lives is more or less distorted by acquired habits and this is perhaps more evident in an age like ours when cinema posters and magazines present us every day with a flood of ready-made images which are to the eye what prejudices are to the mind. The effort to see things without distortion demands a kind of courage; and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he were seeing it for the first time.

But believe me, just because the human mind can't imagine something happening...doesn't mean it won't.

Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.

The human mind shows an urge to capture into fixed forms through unreal assumptions, that is, fictions, that which is chaotic, always in flux, and incomprehensible. Serving this urge, the child quite generally uses a scheme in order to act and to find his way. We proceed much the same when we divide the earth by meridians and parallels, for only thus do we obtain fixed points which we can bring into a relationship with one another.

Time is a funny thing. I was always puzzled with the way a single day could stretch itself out to the point of eternity in your mind, all while years melted down into the fraction of a second.

Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind.

out of sight,out of mind

[On lightweight movies:] Fun movies. They were never meant to cure cancer, only to take away the mind.

The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it...

One will meet, for example, the virtual assumption that what is relative to thought cannot be real. But why not, exactly? Red is relative to sight, but the fact that this or that is in that relation to vision that we call being red is not itself relative to sight; it is a real fact.

When you follow your thoughts and watch them attach to certain things, it makes certain things real and other things unreal, and you realize that this is all created by your mind.

Man can only conceive God within the limitation of his own mind.

All problems are illusions of the mind.

Men first make up their minds (and the smaller the mind the sooner made up), and then seek for the reasons; and if they chance to stumble upon a good reason, of course they do not reject it. But though they are right, they are only right by chance.

You're using your headphones to drown out your mind

If you actually look at the etymology of the word 'hallucination', what it's come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That's the meaning of 'hallucination', to wander in the mind.

NO error is infused into the young mind, to lie there dormant, or to be reproduced only when the subject of thought or action recurs to which the error belongs; but the error becomes a model or archetype, after whose likeness the active powers of the mind create a thousand other errors.

The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.