1. Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
- George Bernard Shaw
2. A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it is not open.
- Frank Zappa
3. Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?
- Carl Sagan
4. Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such
- Henry Miller
5. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.
- Isaac Asimov
6. I will not be famous, great. I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.
- Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary
7. It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.
- George Eliot, Middlemarch
8. The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
- Alan W. Watts
9. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
- G.K. Chesterton
10. A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
11. I find I am much prouder of the victory I obtain over myself, when, in the very ardor of dispute, I make myself submit to my adversary’s force of reason, than I am pleased with the victory I obtain over him through his weakness.
- Michel de Montaigne
12. The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.
- E.B. White
13. Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.
- Iris Murdoch
14. The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
- Malcolm Forbes
15. Open your mind before your mouth
- Aristophanes
16. What is a good man but a bad man's teacher?
What is a bad man but a good man's job?
If you don't understand this, you will get lost,
however intelligent you are.
It is the great secret.
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
17. I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.
- John Adams
18. An open heart is an open mind.
- Dalai Lama XIV
19. The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.
- Ogden Nash
20. We don't stop talking about how the world might be better just because we have no chance of making it to Prime Minister. We are all politicians. We are all artists. In an open society everything the mind and hands can achieve is our birthright. It is up to us to claim it.
- Stephen Fry
21. Footfalls echo in the memory
down the passage we did not take
towards the door we never opened
into the rose garden. My words echo
thus, in your mind
- T.S. Eliot
21. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!
- Henry David Thoreau
Thank you for reading.
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