Mental Digestion Quotes

Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.

The novel, as a genre, was once considered a diversion every bit as frivolous as Facebook, but over the years, we've managed to convince ourselves that reading fiction is as important to our mental digestion as fresh fruits and vegetables are to the processes that take place a little further down.

You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.

I try when I'm writing to fill my head and my ears with all sorts of stuff and then let it settle and filter through. At a certain point it seems like fruitless activity because you're taking a lot of time and not seeming to get anything. And then, slowly, you realize you've actually digested elements and that your thinking is being freed up and the way you build up compositions is changed as a result of what you've been listening to.

This was possible only by dint of extended periods of frequently quite painful reflection and digestion.

I plucke up the goodlie greene herbes of sentences by pruning, eat them by reading, chawe them by musing, and laie them up at length in the hie seate of memorie by gathering them together; that I, having tasted the sweetenes, l may the lesse perceave the bitternes of this miserable life.

The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests.

I don't digest things with my mind.

Contemplation is to knowledge what digestion is to food - the way to get life out of it

Reflective thinking is like the crock pot of the mind. It encourages your thoughts to simmer until they're done.

Just as food eaten without appetite is a tedious nourishment, so does study without zeal damage the memory by not assimilating what it absorbs.

I like to take information in and let it percolate.

Anthologies are mischievous things. Some years ago there was a rage for chemically predigested food, which was only suppressed when doctors pointed out that since human beings had been given teeth and digestive organs they had to be used or they degenerated very rapidly. Anthologies are predigested food for the brain.

This is that which I think great readers are apt to be mistaken in; those who have read of everything, are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind , and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections:;; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.

You want to learn everything that you possibly can, chew it, digest it, and take it for what it is, and then move on.

What works for me is simply to read a lot of stuff throughout the year - not with a particular story or theme in mind, but just because you never know what might be useful or interesting in the long run. I much prefer to just absorb a lot of stuff and let the old unconscious chew down on it over time.

A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.

Sometimes it takes a germ of an idea, which takes a long time to digest.

Intellectual food is like any other; it is pleasanter and more beneficial to take it with a spoon than a shovel.

As a man may be eating all day, and for want of digestion is never nourished, so these endless readers may cram themselves in vain with intellectual food.