The believing mind is eternally impervious to evidence.
- H. L. Mencken
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
- H. L. Mencken
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
- H. L. Mencken
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
- H. L. Mencken
Marriage is a wonderful institution,
but who would want to live in an institution?
- H. L. Mencken
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers,
looks around for a coffin.
- H. L. Mencken
The urge to save humanity is almost always
a false front for the urge to rule.
- H. L. Mencken
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
- H. L. Mencken
The worst government is often the most moral.
One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane.
But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
- H. L. Mencken
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
- H. L. Mencken
The objection to Puritans is not that
they try to make us think as they do,
but that they try to make us do as they think.
- H. L. Mencken
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
- H. L. Mencken
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief
in the occurrence of the improbable.
- H. L. Mencken
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
- H. L. Mencken
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed
(and hence clamorous to be led to safety)
by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins,
all of them imaginary.
- H. L. Mencken
Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband
a month before she marries him
and what she thinks of him a year afterward,
and you will have the truth about him.
- H. L. Mencken
Life is a constant oscillation
between the sharp horns of dilemmas.
- H. L. Mencken
Puritanism. The haunting fear that
someone, somewhere, may be happy.
- H. L. Mencken
Morality is the theory that every human act
must be either right or wrong,
and that 99 % of them are wrong.
- H. L. Mencken
For every complex problem,
there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
- H.L. Mencken
For centuries, theologians have been explaining
the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
- H. L. Mencken
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
- H. L. Mencken
Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.
- H. L. Mencken
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person
to reconcile himself to the idea that
after all God will not help him
- H. L. Mencken
I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie.
I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave.
And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.
- H.L. Mencken
We must respect the other fellow's religion,
but only in the sense and to the extent
that we respect his theory that
his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
- H. L. Mencken
Everybody is a genius.
But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree,
it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
- Albert Einstein
We are born believing.
A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I was wise enough to never grow up
while fooling most people into believing I had.
- Margaret Mead
Faith is believing what you know ain't so.
- Mark Twain
In spite of unseasonable wind, snow
and unexpected weather of all sorts -
a gardener still plants.
And tends what they have planted ...
believing that Spring will come.
- Mary Anne Radmacher
One of the annoying things about believing in free will
and individual responsibility is the difficulty
of finding somebody to blame your problems on.
And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable
how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.
- P. J. O'Rourke
Between believing a thing and thinking you KNOW
is only a small step and quickly taken.
- Mark Twain
Seeing is not always believing.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Having a personal opinion is great.
Believing that one's personal opinion is absolute truth
leads to most of the world's troubles.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Humans do have an amazing capacity
for believing what they choose,
and excluding that which is painful.
- Spock (character in Star Trek television series)
Never be fooled into believing that
there is one speck out of order.
- Byron Katie
Faith consists in believing when it is
beyond the power of reason to believe.
- Voltaire
Resilience is about believing in yourself,
and trusting your own wisdom rather than
being swayed by the opinions of others.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Could you risk believing that everything
will unfold just fine if you completely let go
of all concern about everything else,
and simply are here, now - if only for a moment?
- Dmitri Bilgere
Never stop dreaming your inspired future.
Believing in your dreams is only the first step,
but unless you have a dream that you believe in,
you are leaving your future to random chance.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
You have to be an original individual;
you have to find your innermost core on your own,
with no guide, no guiding scriptures.
It is a dark night, but with the intense fire of inquiry
you are bound to come to the sunrise.
Everybody who has burned with intense inquiry
has found the sunrise.
Others only believe.
Those who believe are not religious,
they are simply avoiding the great adventure
of religion by believing.
- Osho
The believing we do something when we do nothing
is the first illusion of tobacco.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I want to share with you the three rules
that I have in order to accept an apprentice.
Rule Number 1: Don't believe me.
I don't want you to believe me
but I want you to listen and make choices - your choices.
If what I say, doesn't work for you, leave it.
But if it works for you and that's what you want, then make it yours.
Rule Number 2: Don't believe yourself.
Why? Because most of your belief system is a lie - it's not true.
And by believing yourself, you create all the limitations
that don't allow you to be what you really are.
Don't believe yourself. Listen to what you say,
listen to what you think, listen to what you believe.
And when you listen, open your ears, open your mind,
open your intelligence and make choices.
Rule 3 is, don't believe anybody else.
Don't believe them at all.
Open your ears and your mind; listen and make choices.
- don Miguel Ruiz
Is a belief a perception of the five senses,
or is it a perception of emotional feeling?
Is it better to say "I sense" and/or "I feel"?
Is it better to say " I know" than "I believe"?
Is belief based on experience or on a idea?
My thinking is that belief/believing is a very missed used word.
- Anonymous
Just once in a while, let us exalt
the importance of ideas and information.
- Edward R. Murrow
The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself.
- Winston Churchill
Now, if you don't mind, I'd appreciate it if you could lower your wand.
- the movie Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
I got a good mind to join a club
and beat you over the head with it.
- the Groucho Marx movie Duck Soup
One cannot have everything the way he would like it.
A man has no business to be depressed by a disappointment,
anyway; he ought to make up his mind to get even.
- Mark Twain
The mind is not a vessel to be filled
but a fire to be kindled.
- Plutarch
The natural cause of the human mind
is certainly from credulity to skepticism.
- Thomas Jefferson
The human mind is our fundamental resource.
- John F. Kennedy
Today, I am Sending My Monkey Mind to the Zoo.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind
and won't change the subject.
- Winston Churchill
The mind has exactly the same power as the hands:
not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.
- Colin Wilson
God Loves an Open Mind, Clean Hands, and a Loving Heart.
So does Your Mother.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
The will to believe chases out the rational mind,
whenever and wherever the two come into conflict.
- Philip K. Dick
The trouble with having an open mind, of course,
is that people will insist on coming along
and trying to put things in it.
- Terry Pratchett
Iron rusts from disuse;
water loses its purity from stagnation...
even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Faced with the choice between changing one's mind
and proving that there is no need to do so,
almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
- John Kenneth Galbraith
A little girl at the wedding afterwards asked her mother
why the bride changed her mind.
What do you mean? responded her mother.
Well, she went down the aisle with one man,
and came back with another.
- Anonymous
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,
but by making the darkness conscious.
- Carl Jung
The moment a person forms a theory,
his imagination sees in every object
only the traits which favor that theory.
- Thomas Jefferson
The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing.
- Publilius Syrus
Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known.
- Michel de Montaigne
Mind Chatter...
"I'm too fat; I'm too thin; and my hair is a fright;
And I'm never enough; and my world is not right;
I'm not smart; I'm not cute; I'm not strong; I'm a bust
I earn scorn; I earn hate; I'm no good; I disgust."
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Beware the Rattlesnake of the Mind.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
The moment we want to believe something,
we suddenly see all the arguments for it,
and become blind to the arguments against it.
- George Bernard Shaw
To the mind that is still,
the whole universe surrenders.
- Lao Tzu
Life does not consist mainly,
or even largely, of facts or happenings.
It consist mainly of the storm of thoughts
that is forever flowing through one's head.
- Mark Twain
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May the world be kind to you,
and may your own thoughts be gentle upon yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
All materials & writings are copyright © Jonathan Lockwood Huie, except for quotes and other specifically identified material which belong to their respective copyright holders if applicable.