At one moment, his eyes sparkled in the light and in the next they were enshrouded in shadow. What connected those bands of light and dark? Could they indeed have been distinct entities?

And if she liked and trusted the person who asked, she would add that yes, it was kind of a lot to deal with: her outward affect was bright and capable, and that was no...

Anger’s like a battery that leaks acid right out of meAnd it starts from the heart ’til it reaches my outer me

What you find in the mirror you will find in the reality it mirrors.

There are two circumstances that lead to arrogance: one is when you’re wrong and you can’t face it; the other is when you’re right and nobody else can face it.

You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn’t a...

Needless to say, that meant that the Braekbills student body was quite the psychological menagerie. Carrying that much onboard cognitive processing power had a way of distorting your personality. And to actually want to work...

I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.

Our metaphors for the operation of the brain are frequently drawn from the production line. We think of the brain as a glorified sausage machine, taking in information from the senses, processing it and regurgitating...

The mechanism by which spirituality becomes passionate is metaphor. An ineffable God requires metaphor not only to be imagined but to be approached, exhorted, evaded, confronted, struggled with, and loved. Through metaphor, the vividness, intensity,...

Travelling, whether in the mental or the physical world, is a joy, and it is good to know that, in the mental world at least, there are vast countries still very imperfectly explored

A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.

Nightmares are seldom a foreshadowing of real events, but always a showing of real fears.

I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but...

Y la cuestión es ésta: la televisión invierte la evolución de lo sensible en inteligible y lo convierte en el ictu oculi, en un regreso al puro y simple acto de ver. La televisión produce...

If it be true that there can be no metaphysics transcending human reason, it is no less true that there can be no empirical knowledge that is not already caught and limited by the a...

Then, as Father had trained him, Rigg thought past his feelings.

Unprovoked hostility is often but displaced self-defense: ‘I must stop him before he stops me.’ In many of such environments, nobody is really hateful so much as they are just fearful.

How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny...

…depressive realism. Depression is not the near death experience described by so many, [Kayla Dunn] suggests, but a rebirth in which the new psyche has removed self-delusion. Compared with so-called healthy individuals, depressives are more...

Question the answers, I repeated every class. Reevaluate your conclusions when the evidence changes.

There is a sense in which all cognition can be said to be motivated. One is motivated to understand the world, to be in touch with reality, to remove doubt, etc. Alternately one might say...

To swear day and night by media slander will make one a bigger victim than the slandered. It doesn’t take much to begin to fear a mere illusion of human badness.

Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars.

It is cognition that is the fantasy…. Everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be able to explain to you the form of...

I wanted that future officer to weigh decisions with a supple mind and to be comfortable with nuance and uncertainty.

Knowledge is not discovery, but recognition.

You think you’re losing your mind, but do keep in mind, as long as you may, that the ability to go on thinking such a thing means it’s not all gone.

Science, in all its greatness, is still subject to human creativity. It starts the first moment a child tries to reach up and grab at the clouds. Soon, the child learns that his own hands...

The destructive effects of video games are not on boys’ cognitive abilities or their reaction times, but on their motivation and their connectedness with the real world.

Whenever I think of something but can’t think of what it was I was thinking of, I can’t stop thinking until I think I’m thinking of it again. I think I think too much.

You are what resides before, beyond and between what you think so do not be consumed by thought. It is only a fragment of your magic.

Pride is born as a mountaintop on a valley, but dies as an abyss in which it is too deep and too dark to see the better.

A popular myth is that learning is largely a matter of motivation. Increasingly, the key to effective learning in the information era is how you think, not how you feel.

The hardest chore to do, and to do right, is to think. Why do you think the common man would choose labor, partially, as a distraction from his own thoughts? It is because that level...

As historical texts become rich and conceptually dense, readers may slow down not because they fail to comprehend, but because the very act of comprehension demands that they stop to TALK with their texts. In...

When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them.

If the brain was simple enough to be understood – we would be too simple to understand it!

Be careful not to appear obsessively intellectual. When intelligence fills up, it overflows a parody.

Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.

The exaggerated dopamine sensitivity of the introvert leads one to believe that when in public, introverts, regardless of its validity, often feel to be the center of (unwanted) attention hence rarely craving attention. Extroverts, on...

The one and only true freedom we ALL possess is what we think; and our intentions govern what we think.

Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks (explaining our penchant for baseball). A cavewoman thinking...

God judges men from the inside out; men judge men from the outside in. Perhaps to God, an extreme mental patient is doing quite well in going a month without murder, for he fought his...

Our view of the mind not only shapes our view of ourselves; less obviously, it also shapes our view of that part of our experience we conceive of as dealing with the external world. As...

The complete recipe for imagination is absolute boredom.

Light and Dark: each was unaware that the other existed.

We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.

Lingering, bottled-up anger never reveals the ‘true colors’ of an individual. It, on the contrary, becomes all mixed up, rotten, confused, forms a highly combustible, chemical compound then explodes as something foreign, something very different...

Consciousness, which is the “reflective” element of Norman’s conceptual brain, handles the “higher” functions at the metaphorical tip of the very top of that complicated organ. Because consciousness pays a lot of attention to your...