Closed Mindset Quotes

Don't shut down the feedback loop with judgment, rigid beliefs, and prejudices.

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves - and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.

When it comes to art and science, people don't like a lot of either. Instead of being open to it, they're closed off about it.

Making America great again, as if to keep the world out. The world and all its fresh ideas and everything that's new and exhilarating and the wind of change that should blow through the world - block it out, wall ourselves up. That for me goes with a small vocabulary. A narrow, confining vocabulary.

It's funny; people get so doctrinaire about music. It should be the last thing you don't have an open mind about.

Professional opinion is skeptical about anything that doesn't fit in with the version of reality it has been programmed to believe in. The skepticism comes from a lack of understanding and the need to defend the status quo and not from actual knowledge of the subject.

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

An ideologue - one who thinks ideologically - can't lose. He can't lose because his answer, his interpretation and his attitude have been determined in advance of the particular experience or observation. They are derived from the ideology, and not subject to the facts.

There are people who never experience that, who remain closed until death, from fear of change.

Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.

In order to keep an open mind, I am trying to avoid learning anything.

The unwilling mind is not a teachable mind.

All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn´t come fast enough. Instead of being open, you´re closed up tight. That´s the worst sin of all - the sin of omission.

There are certain things which the average Irish mind will never allow as debatable.

We feel that we have to be right so that we can feel good... The whole right and wrong business closes us down and makes our world smaller.

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance ... or change. Once such incantatory phrases as "we see now through a glass darkly" and "mysterious are the ways". He chooses His wonders to perform" are mastered, logic can be happily tossed out the window". Religious mania is one of the few infallible ways of responding to the world's vagaries, because it totally eliminates pure accident. To the true religious maniac, it's all on purpose.

To have a very strong opinion all the time is corrosive to a person's intellect. It becomes your default position.

I started out in the Chabad movement, and I started pretty closed up, with the idea of there being that 'this is it.' I bought into that fully. I really explored in depth the Chabad ideology.

Fear, anger, stubbornness, and distrust portray themselves as your rescuers. Actually these energies only make you more closed off. Tell yourself: Nobody ever solved a situation by panicking; no one ever solved a situation by refusing to hear new answers; no one solved a situation by shutting down.

There are joys which long to be ours. God sends ten thousands truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.

We are set in our ways, bound by our perspectives and stuck in our thinking.

When our inner child is not nurtured and nourished, our minds gradually close to new ideas, unprofitable commitments and the surprises of the Spirit.

"Edward, Edward," he said with a patronising smile, "there are no unanswered questions of any relevance. Every question that we need to ask has been answered fully. If you can't find the correct answer then you are obviously asking the wrong question."

If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk.