George Santayana Quotes

It is decreed by a merciful Nature that the human brain cannot think of two things simultaneously . . .

We used to think that you could pay attention to five to nine things at a time. We now know that's not true. That's a crazy overestimate. The conscious mind can attend to about three things at once. Trying to juggle any more than that, and you're going to lose some brainpower.

The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time.

Every second of every day, our senses bring in way too much data than we can possibly process in our brains.

I'm not very good at multi-tasking. Most people aren't, but they think they are. The mind is really better when you're really focused on one thing.

Your mind simply can't focus forward and downward all at the same time.

While doing work if the mind continues to be active let it be so, but there must be at the same time a capacity for silence.

Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.

Categories are gibberish to me. I understand - it helps people organize their thoughts. But you can't go too far with it.

A brain is only capable of what it could conceive, andit couldnt concieve what it hasnt experienced

The mind that engages in subjects of too great variety becomes confused and weakened.

Your mind is a cupboard and you stock the shelves.

Clear therefore thy head, and rally, and manage thy thoughts rightly, and thou wilt save time, and see and do thy business well; for thy judgment will be distinct, thy mind free, and the faculties strong and regular.

We can only receive what our minds are capable of accepting.

We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.

There is so much information that our ability to focus on any piece of it is interrupted by other information, so that we bathe in information but hardly absorb or analyse it. Data are interrupted by other data before we've thought about the first round, and contemplating three streams of data at once may be a way to think about none of them.

The mind of man is more intuitive than logical, and comprehends more than it can coordinate.

Small minds cannot grasp great subjects.

The ability of nonintelligent people to understand the most complicated mechanisms and to use them has always been to me a cause of astonishment: their inability to understand simple questions is even more astonishing. The general acceptance of simple ideas is difficult and rare, and yet it is only when simple, fundamental, ideas have been accepted that further progress becomes possible on a higher level.

The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time. Get into a fist fight, put your mind on the strategy of the fight, and you will not feel the other fellow's punches.

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much.

A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,— congestion of the brain, apoplexy and strangulation.

The mind is smaller than the eye.

My mind is a chest of drawers. When I wish to deal with a subject, I shut all the drawers but the one in which the subject is to be found. When I am wearied, I shut all the drawers and go to sleep.