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Mind.

Explore passages mentioning mind, thought, thoughts. Topic suggestions use transparent word matching, not scholarly classification. Editorial meanings and lexical matches are discovery aids, not independent authentication of a quotation.

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592 results · Page 25 of 25Play this collection ▷
01c. 1872 AD
On Meeting Again.—A: Do I quite understand you? You are in search of something? Where, in the midst of the present, actual world, is your niche and star? Where can you lay yourself in the sun, so that you also may have a surplus of well-being, that your existence may justify itself? Let everyone do that for himself—you seem to say, —and let him put talk about generalities, concern for others and society, out of his mind!—B: I want more; I am no seeker. I want to create my own sun for myself.
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02c. 1872 AD
In Media Vita.—No! Life has not deceived me! On the contrary, from year to year I find it richer, more desirable and more mysterious—from the day on which the great liberator broke my fetters, the thought that life may be an experiment of the thinker—and not a duty, not a fatality, not a deceit!—And knowledge itself may be for others something different; for example, a bed of ease, or the path to a bed of ease, or an entertainment, or a course of idling,—for me it is a world of dangers and victories, in which even the heroic sentiments have their arena and dancing-floor. "Life as a means to knowledge"—with this principle in one's heart, one can not only be brave, but can even live joyfully and laugh joyfully! And who could know how to laugh well and live well, who did not first understand the full significance of war and victory?
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04c. 1872 AD
How one has to Distinguish first of all in Works of Art—Everything that is thought, versified, painted and composed, yea, even built and moulded, belongs either to monologic art, or to art before witnesses. Under the latter there is also to be included the apparently monologic art which involves the belief in God, the whole lyric of prayer; because for a pious man there is no solitude,—we, the godless, have been the first to devise this invention. I know of no profounder distinction in all the perspective of the artist than this: Whether he looks at his growing work of art (at "himself—") with the eye of the witness; or whether he "has forgotten the world," as is the essential thing in all monologic art,—it rests on forgetting, it is the music of forgetting.
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07c. 1842 AD
I pray you, O excellent wife, not to cumber yourself and me to get a rich dinner for this man or this woman who has alighted at our gate, nor a bed-chamber made ready at too great a cost. These things they can get for a dollar at any village. But let this stranger, if he will, in your looks, in your accent, and behavior, read your heart and earnestness, your thought and will, which he cannot buy at any price in any village or city, and which he may well travel fifty miles and dine sparely and sleep hard in order to behold. Certainly, let the board be spread and let the bed be dressed for the traveler; but let not the emphasis of hospitality lie in these things. Honor to the house where they are simple to the verge of hardship, so that there the intellect is awake and reads the laws of the Universe.
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14In print by 1857 AD
The tongue goes to where the tooth aches.

Meaning: Attention often returns to a source of discomfort. Notice whether revisiting it helps you understand or address the problem, or merely keeps the irritation in view.

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15In print by 1857 AD
Fear is a great inventor.

Meaning: Fear can produce ingenious preparations or imagined dangers. Examine whether a new idea responds to evidence and helps the situation rather than merely extending the alarm.

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16In print by 1857 AD
The most covered fire is always the most glowing.

Meaning: Something concealed can retain considerable intensity. The covered fire cautions against assuming a quiet surface reveals the strength of what lies beneath, without making hidden feelings a certainty.

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