Mental gymnastics Quotes

I love words; they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.

We humans, you see, have an infinite capacity for self-rationalization.

Sometimes people need to lie to themselves most of all.

The process of reading is not a half sleep, but in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle: that the reader is to do something for him or herself, must be on the alert, just construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay--the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start, the framework.

He would have lied to himself as facilely as an alcoholic lies to himself to justify the 10 a.m. tumbler of vodka : it may be early here, but in Baghdad it's almost evening.

The mind, too, has its regimen. It needs gymnastics, just like the body does.

The fool tries to adjust the truth so he does not have to adjust to it.

Don't knock rationalization. Where would we be without it? I don't know anyone who'd get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They're more important than sex. Have you ever gone a week without a rationalization?

Acting is different from mental gymnastics. You try to discover as much about the character as you can, but a large area is mysterious.

I told myself it was the snow—she couldn’t possibly get to Philadelphia on the roads. I told myself a hundred lies. Children do that. It’s amazing the sorts of things you’ll make yourself believe.

The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.

It's a form of mental and verbal gymnastics, and one of the things that appeals to me most about commenting on darts is that no one knows exactly what I'm going to come out with next - and neither do I.

It takes some serious mental gymnastics to think of the Confederacy only as a romantic lost cause.

If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity.

[on BBC's Sherlock] It's a rare challenge, both for the audience and an actor, to take part in something with this level of intelligence and wit. You have to really enjoy it. It's a form of mental and physical gymnastics.

I'm a writer, so whatever gymnastics jump through my head, I write about it.

The only thing that mattered to me with 'Xen' was setting things up against each other in an uncomfortable way. If there's a really soft piece of music, and then you're hit by a painful explosive sound, your brain does this funny somersault trying to make sense of why this happened. And at that very moment, your brain is malleable.

It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true.

Rationalization is one of the real obstacles to obedience.

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

It was complicated. I understood it, mostly, but I had to think a little sideways to do it.

I enjoy the mental gymnastics that go along with matching voice to picture and vice versa and trying to accent the action as opposed to provide all of the action through my words. And that's really what play-by-play is.

The ingenuities we practice in order to appear admirable to ourselves would suffice to invent the telephone twice over on a rainy summer morning.

It's amazing the gymnastics you can do when you don't want to do something. How you can force yourself against all the forces of nature. I threw myself backward.