Mental Persistence Quotes

What's powerful about the mind, the mind comes through every physical and when the physical goes the mind still exists.

If an idea is compelling enough it'll stick in my head until I am forced to write it. If it's forgettable, who cares?

Instead of just hammering away at a song, I'll approach it from a million other angles. Sometimes I'll leave all my equipment set up and just turn on the TV for five minutes; sometimes I've gotta get out of the house. I don't think it every really leaves my head.

Mental states of every kind, - sensations, feelings, ideas, - which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it, have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist.

Negative thoughts stick around because we believe them, not because we want them or choose them.

Once you're a chess player, you spend a lot of time thinking about the game and you can't get it completely out of your head.

In order that a "self" may exist there must be some continuity of mental experiences and, particularly, continuity bridging gaps of unconsciousness. For example, the continuity of our "self" is resumed after sleep, anaesthesia, and the temporary amnesias of concussion and convulsions.

One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. For a sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty it is called remorse. God stirs up the soul as well as the ocean.

And if thought and emotion can persist in this way so long after the brain that sent them forth has crumpled into dust, how vitally important it must be to control their very birth in the heart, and guard them with the keenest possible restraint.

One of the frustrations of having a mind trained to think and consider possibilities was that it couldn't simply be stopped once engaged.

But while success and failure depend on conditions, the mind neither waxes nor wanes.

The mind goes on working no matter how we try to hold it back.

It's hard for me to shut off my writer brain completely.

The book forces itself into my mind when I am lugging furniture, or pulling weeds.

Negative thoughts stick around because we believe them, not because we want them or choose them.

However, the mind has an amazing ability to continue worrying away at a problem all on its own, so that when the "Eureka!" comes it is as mysterious as if it were God speaking.

He had to keep thinking of them because if he forgot them and did not think of them they might forget about him. And he had to keep hoping.

You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not - life has been lived but it is still all going on, in the mind for better and for worse.