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A closed mind is not only closed to outside thoughts, it is often
closed to itself as well. It is closed to new thoughts and anything that
threatens the status quo. But if you can open the doors, maybe just a
crack at first, the ideas that have been patiently waiting at your gates
will flood in.
See also
belief, children, incubation*, leaping, letting go*, opportunity, perception,
play*, resistance, seeing*, wisdom
Quotes
‘It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without
accepting it.’
— Aristotle
‘If a Man will begin with certainties, he will end in doubts; but if he will
be content to begin with doubts he will end in certainties.’
— Francis Bacon
‘When one door closes, another opens. But we often look so regretfully upon
the closed door that we don’t see the one which has opened for us.’
— Alexander Graham Bell
‘The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.’
— Henri Bergson
‘I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem in as
much as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to control
and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is,
is right.’
— Henry Bessemer
‘A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things but cannot
receive great ones.’
— G. K. Chesterton
‘We all operate in two contrasting modes, which might be called open and
closed. The open mode is more relaxed, more receptive, more exploratory, more
democratic, more playful and more humorous. The closed mode is the tighter, more
rigid, more hierarchical, more tunnel-visioned. Most people, unfortunately spend
most of their time in the closed mode.’
— John Cleese
‘Creative experiences can be produced regularly, consistently, almost daily
in people’s lives. It requires enormous personal security and openness and a
spirit of adventure.’
— Steven Covey
‘Minds are like parachutes — they only function when open.’
— Thomas Dewar
‘People only see what they are prepared to see.’
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
‘I’m looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what
can’t be done.’
— Henry Ford
‘The outward freedom that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion to
the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment. And if this is
a correct view of freedom, our chief energy must be concentrated on achieving
reform from within.’
— Mahatma Gandhi
‘One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going.’
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
‘Presumption must be quenched even more than a fire.’
— Heraclitus
‘If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it, for it is not to
be reached by search or trail.’
— Heraclitus
‘If you don’t ask ‘Why this?’ often enough, someone will ask, ‘Why you?’.’
— Tom Hirshfield
‘Sit down before facts like a child, and be prepared to give up every
preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature
leads, or you shall learn nothing.’
— Thomas Huxley
‘No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an
uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.’
— Helen Keller
‘It’s amazing what ordinary people can do if they set out without
preconceived notions.’
— Charles F. Kettering
‘Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.’
— Charles F. Kettering
‘One change always leaves the door open for the establishment of others.’
— Niccolò Machiavelli
‘Now there’s a man with an open mind—you can feel the breeze from here!’
— Groucho Marx
‘You study, you learn, but you guard the original naivete. It has to be
within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the
lover.’
— Henri Matisse
‘Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and
listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been
able to guess.’
— Margaret Mead
‘I consider it my job to nurture the creativity of the people I work with
because at Sony we know that a terrific idea is more likely to happen in an
open, free and trusting atmosphere than when everything is calculated, every
action analysed and every responsibility assigned by an organisation chart.’
— Akio Morita
‘When I feel well and in a good humour, or when I am taking a drive or
walking after a good meal, or in the night when I cannot sleep, thoughts crowd
into my mind as easily as my mind might wish.’
— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
‘When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good
cheer–say, travelling in a carriage or walking after after a good meal or during
the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best
and most abundantly. Whence and how they come I know not; nor can I force them.’
— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
‘Become a possibilitarian. No matter how dark things seem to be or actually
are, raise your sights and see possibilities–always see them, for they are
always there.’
— Norman Vincent Peale
‘The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the
place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing
shape, from a spider’s web.’
— Pablo Picasso
‘Einstein does not remain attached to the classical principles, and when
presented with a problem in physics he quickly envisages all of its
possibilities. This leads immediately in his mind to the prediction of new
phenomena which may one day be verified by experiment.’
— Henri Poincaré
‘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
‘We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible
state of things.’
— Marcel Proust
‘Before he can create, man must have a deep awareness of the world about
him.’
— Harold A. Rothbart
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