cognitive confinement Quotes

Imprisonment of the body is bitter; imprisonment of the mind is worse

Without the instruments and accumulated knowledge of the natural sciences... humans are trapped in a cognitive prison. They are like intelligent fish born in a deep shallowed pool. Wondering and restless, longing to reach out, they think about the world outside. They invent ingenious speculations and myths about the origin of the confining waters, of the sun and the sky and the stars above , and the meaning of their own existence. But they are wrong, always wrong because the world is too remote from ordinary experience to be merely imagined.

We are all prisoners of our thoughts.

Often, the worst way to become prisoner of a system is to have a dream that things may turn better, there is always the possibility of change. Because it is precisely this secret dream that keeps you enslaved to the system.

Form is burden. Sometimes being part of the system enslaves the mind and greatly limits the imagination by enslaving it to form. Form is a burden to the mind that sees no limits. Form is a prison for the soul who sees possibilities outside the lines and wishes to test them.

They don’t need walls and water to keep the prisoners in, not when they’re trapped inside their own heads, incapable of a single cheerful thought. Most go mad within weeks - Lupin

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

If you're going to be a prisoner of your own mind, the least you can do is make sure it's well furnished.

Why should a man deliberately encircle his mind with needless prison walls. No man can reach highest excellence who puts limits to his own thought.

The shackles of belief, when reinforced by fear, are difficult to break free from and rarely done.

It is the man who can think of no alternative to his enslavement who is truly a slave.

Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.

Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.