After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self-indulgence? One reads to tickle an...d amuse one's mind; one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing--to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all ...thoughts. Not a select party.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity--it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's min...d.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Imagination could hardly do without metaphor, for imagination is, literally, the moving around in one's mind of images, and such i...mages tend commonly to be metaphoric. Creative minds, as we know, are rich in images and metaphors, and this is true in science and art alike. The difference between scientist and artist has little to do with the ways of the creative imagination; everything to do with the manner of demonstration and verification of what has been seen or imagined.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of ...the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am more and more convinced that the ant colony is not so much composed of separate individuals as that the colony is a sort of i...ndividual, and each ant like a loose cell in it. Our own blood stream, for instance, contains hosts of white corpuscles which differ little from free-swimming amoebae. When bacteria invade the blood stream, the white corpuscles, like the ants defending the nest, are drawn mechanically to the infected spot, and will die defending the human cell colony. I admit that the comparison is imperfect, but the attempt to liken the individual human warrior to the individual ant in battle is even more inaccurate and misleading. The colony of ants with its component numbers stands half way, as a mechanical, intuitive, and psychical phenomenon, between our bodies as a collection of cells with separate functions and our armies made up of obedient privates. Until one learns both to deny real individual initiative to the single ant, and at the same time to divorce one's mind from the persuasion that the colony has a headquarters which directs activity ... one can make nothing but pretty fallacies out of the polity of the ant heap.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was odd how one found oneself making trivial conversation on important occasions. Perhaps it was because one could not say what... was really in one's mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »