inner thoughts Quotes

″Each of us has many, many maps in our head, which can be divided into two main categories: maps of the way things are, or realities, and maps of the way things should be, or values. We interpret everything we experience through these mental maps. We seldom question their accuracy; we’re usually even unaware that we have them. We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be.″

“I’m well aware that at the back of my mind, thumping quietly like a drumbeat, are the twin horrors of Guilt and Panic.”

“Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness.”

″ ‘You left because you are against our cause as freedom fighters. Right?’ (...) What cause? I thought. I used the only freedom that I had then, my thought. ”

“Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”

“To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but what he aspires to.”

“There was something about him—about those eyes and that stare—something familiar. It was the kind of something that made everyone else in the room fade away into the dark recess of my mind until there was no one left but me and him. He was the picture. Everything else around him was just white noise.”

“I know myself . . . but that is all.”

“Our acts can be no wiser than our thoughts.”

“But for now, let’s go back to the places in the world where we most need transparency and so rarely have it.”

“Remember, you become what you think. Think discouraging thoughts, and you’ll get discouraged.”

“I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats.”

“I learned it without being forced by threats of punishment, because it was my own wish to be able to give expression to my thoughts.”

“Thoughts are just a different kind of bacteria, colonizing you. I thought about the gut-brain information axis. Maybe you’re already gone. The prisoners run the jail now. Not a person so much as a swarm. Not a bee, but the hive.”

“I is the hardest word to define.”

“In bantering lies the key to human warmth.”

“What seems threatening is just the echo of the fear in my own heart.”

“It is certain that I cannot always distinguish my own thoughts from those I read, because what I read becomes the very substance and texture of my mind.”

“As a person thinks, feels, and believes, so is the condition of his or her mind, body, and circumstances.”

“The law of attraction attracts to you everything you need, according to the nature of your thought life. Your environment and financial condition are the perfect reflection of your habitual thinking. Thought rules the world.”

“All things that have happened to you are based on thoughts impressed on the subconscious mind through belief. The subconscious mind will accept your beliefs and accept your convictions.”

“Think good and good follows. Think evil and evil follows. You are what you think all day long.”

“The truth is you can acquire any quality you want by acting as though you already have it.”

“My old thoughts about the silt of a billion years covering all this and all cities and generations eventually is just a dumb old thought, ‘Only a silly sober fool could think it, imagine gloating over such nonsense’ (because in one sense the drinker learns wisdom, in the words of Goethe or Blake or whichever it was “The pathway to wisdom lies through excess’) – But in this condition you can only say ‘Wisdom is just another way to make people sick.‘”

“Most people seemed to have a hard outer shell that protected them from mean people, insults, bad memories.”

“I thought of myself as a free-floating one-celled amoeba, minding my own business.”

“Every now and then I could see myself—truly see myself—and a sentence would come to me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was the woman with the hole in her heart.”

“Because he’s always looking at something beyond me. He can never see me. I cried myself to sleep, thinking of him.”

“Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can’t quite name.”

“I have often felt that I would find it more complicated, troublesome and unpleasant to ascertain the feelings by which a woman lives than to plumb the innermost thoughts of an earthworm.”

“Because when you fall in love with someone exactly the way they are, how do you convince yourself they aren’t enough for you?”

“A convict’s thoughts are no freer than he is: they come back to the same place, worry over the same thing continually.”

“He reached a finger to twirl his moustache, experienced a peculiar irritation when he remembered that he had shaved it off as a gesture of defiance against Hitler, and then looked down at the black armband that he had worn ever since the death of Metaxas.”

“For I felt that without a common bond uniting men, without a continuous current of shared thought and feeling circulating through the social system, like blood coursing through the body, there could be no living worthy of being called human.”

“A man is but a product of his thoughts. What he thinks he becomes.”

“The fortunate people in the world--the only real fortunate people in the world, in my mind, -- are those whose work is also their pleasure.”

“If you refuse to entertain a baby cousin, the baby cousin may get bored and entertain itself by wandering off and falling down a well. If you refuse to entertain a pack of hyenas, they may become restless and entertain themselves by devouring you.”

“I am the one who sees. From back in here somewhere, I look out, and I am aware of the events, thoughts, and emotions that pass before me.”

“The only thing we are ever dealing with is a thought, and a thought can be changed. No matter what the problem is, our experiences are just outer effects of inner thoughts.”

“I’m thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I’ve got something important to say and the power to say it--only I don’t know what it is, and I can’t make any use of the power. If there was some different way of writing... Or else something else to write about...”

He looked at Anne as if he were thinking some things about her that couldn’t be expressed in words.