Mental Operation Quotes

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact.

...forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation.

Every action needs to be prompted by a motive. To know and to will are two operations of the human mind. Discerning, judging, deliberating are acts of the human mind.

First of all you are a writer, a writer is what you are, so it doesn't actually stop the moment you leave your desk, your computer, your keyboard, whatever. Something is operating the back of your mind.

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.

What decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. There can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its programme is at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm.

The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense.

I want to know how the mind works.

I'm really not responsible for what mental operation people have when they're reading my books other than the ones which are created by literary effects.

It's so internalized, the way your mind works in relation to anything - it's a process, but then it isn't. It's working all the time.

My suggestion is that at each state the proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known, not only in formal logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language, etc.

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.