Mental Construction Quotes

The act of listening is in fact an act of composing.

Spirit is the life, the mind the builder the physical the result

Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.

Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.

None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.

What you make up in your heads sticks if it's good, falls out if it's bad. If we still remember something a day after we made it up, it might be worth building on.

In all our perceptions, from vision to hearing, to the pictures we build of people's character, our unconscious mind starts from whatever objective data is available to us - usually spotty - and helps to shape and construct the more complete picture we consciously perceive.

Even the simple act that we call "going to visit a person of our acquaintance" is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role.

You build your mind, so make it into something you want to live with.

Imagery is not past but present. It rests with what we call our mental processes to place these images in a temporal order.

A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.

...it is fifty percent what they see, and fifty percent what they think they see.

I don't think you would have any trouble at all in deciding that you are thinking of some event and then visualizing it happening with its consequences, and constructing a rational analysis of it without being able to verbalize it adequately in anything like its full complexity.

To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing).

The way I build stuff in my mind, it's sort of like a puzzle for me. I always talk about it like, when I'm writing a scene there's a certain feeling I'm trying to create. I'll have my list of scenes and it's more like feelings, these notes I want to hit.

When each thought absorbs your attention completely, it means you identify with the voice in your head. Thought then becomes invested with a sense of self. This is the ego, a mind-made "me." That mentally constructed self feels incomplete and precarious. That's why fearing and wanting are its predominant emotions and motivating forces.

Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes—like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night —little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape wil be quite hidden in the end.

From a sequence of these individual patterns, whole buildings with the character of nature will form themselves within your thoughts, as easily as sentences.

Dreams look real, but they're in your mind, so you realize that the physical world is also a construction, which shows that the mind can affect reality in more ways than you can imagine.

Writing is manual labor of the mind - like laying pipe.

We figure to ourselves The thing we like; and then we build it up, As chance will have it, on the rock or sand,- For thought is tired of wandering o'er the world, And homebound Fancy runs her bark ashore.

Color is just in a small area of our vision, and the rest we add with the mind.

In metaphysics, the notion that earth and all that's on it is a mental construct is the product of people who spend their lives inside rooms. It is an indoor philosophy.

The poem builds in my mind and sits there, as if in a register, until the poem, or a piece of a longer poem, is finished enough to write down. I can hold several lines in my head for quite some time, but as soon as they are written down, the register clears, as it were, and I have to work with what is on the paper.