12 Quotes Tagged: open-mind

The only real voyage consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes; in seeing the universe through the eyes of another, one hundred others-in seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees.
Marcel Proust, translated by Kiyotesong

Real education is a radical process. It thumps you on the head until everything you know makes no sense anymore. Then you run around picking up the pieces of your head and picking them back together. The pieces never go back together in the same way.

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

When a composer feels a responsibility to make, rather than accept, he eliminates from the area of possibility all events that do not suggest that at that point in time vogue of profundity, for he takes himself seriously, wishes to be considered great, and he thereby diminishes his love and increases his fear and concern about what people will think.

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.

When we are closed to ideas, what we hear is criticism. When we are open to criticism, what we get is advice.

West Wind #2

You are young. So you know everything. You leap
into the boat and begin rowing. But listen to me.
Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without
any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me.
Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and
your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to
me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent
penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a
dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile
away and still out of sight, the churn of the water
as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the
sharp rocks – when you hear that unmistakable
pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth
and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls
plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life
toward it.

I find I am much prouder of the victory I obtain over myself, when, in the very ardor of dispute, I make myself submit to my adversary’s force of reason, than I am pleased with the victory I obtain over him through his weakness.

Yet do not miss the moral, my good men.
For Saint Paul says that all that’s written well
Is written down some useful truth to tell.
Then take the wheat and let the chaff lie still.

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.

We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

We have eyelids but not earlids, for the ears are the portals of learning, and Nature wanted to keep them wide open.