💬 Quotes

"True wisdom consists in the power of forming a correct estimate of evidence, and in the habit of proportioning our assent strictly to the nature and degree of that evidence."

"You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you."

"If you are depressed, it is because you are choosing to be depressed."

"There is no such thing as stress in the world, only people thinking stressful thoughts."

"Guilt is the most useless of all the emotional zones. It keeps you immobilized in the present by worrying about something you did in the past."

"Approval-seeking is a habit that will destroy you if you let it, because it is impossible to live your life to please everyone else."

"Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone, the future is not guaranteed."

"The fundamental principles of our knowledge are not deduced from reasoning, but are the immediate gift of intuition, forming the very groundwork upon which all our subsequent reasoning must rest."

"Attention may be regarded as the most important of all our intellectual faculties; it is the spring which sets all the other powers in motion, and upon its degree and quality the perfection of our memory and judgment entirely depends."

"The laws of the human mind can only be discovered by an inductive process—by a careful and patient examination of particular facts, and by carefully distinguishing between the phenomena which are primitive and those which are the result of habit and education."

"Imagination is not merely a creative faculty that recombines past impressions; it is an active principle of sympathy and foresight that enables us to anticipate the consequences of human actions and to enter into the feelings of others."

"Language is not merely an instrument for the communication of thought, but an essential instrument of thought itself; without the aid of signs, our abstract ideas could neither be fixed nor reasoned upon with any degree of precision."

"Memory is deeply intertwined with the laws of association; we do not recall the past by chance, but according to established connections of contiguity, resemblance, and causation which give order to the stream of consciousness."

"And it is not only the motor areas that are involved, but the emotional areas, the limbic system, with all its depth and resonance. Music can move us to tears or to laughter, but it can also move us to action."

"What we musicophiles go through is simply a more intense version of what most people experience. For we are all musicophiles to some degree."

"An ear for music is a strange thing. Modern biology would tell us that music is mere noise, an evolutionary byproduct, an auditory cheesecake; yet it touches the deepest levels of our minds."

"Common to all these cases is the power of music to bridge impairments, to bypass the damaged pathways of the brain and reach the self intact."

"Musical imagery, or 'earworms,' can be benign and transient, or they can be persistent and intrusive, sometimes dominating a person's consciousness to the point of torment."

"In amusia, the world of music simply ceases to exist; melodies are perceived merely as random, meaningless noises, devoid of emotional resonance or structure."

"My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break."