When you completely extract yourself from anything familiar, you start reverting back to that state of mind where you're having conversations with yourself, and that's where the weirdest and most honest ideas come from.
Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.
I think the Internet has a way of coaching you into this state of mind where you think that every step you make needs to completely supersede the last.
In the matter of physics, the first lessons should contain nothing but what is experimental and interesting to see. A pretty experiment is in itself often more valuable than twenty formulae extracted from our minds.
Writing to offer a piece of information or a connection is a great way to demonstrate that you're looking out for the other person. Humans have a tendency to want to reciprocate, so the more you show you're looking out for someone, the more likely that person will begin to keep you in mind as well.
Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, as we shall yet have an American genius.
When the contemplative mind is a French mind, it is content, for the most part, to contemplate France. When the contemplative mind is an English mind, it is liable to be seized at any moment by an importunate desire to contemplate Morocco or Labrador.
Never imitate. The mind is an imitator, because imitation is very easy. To be someone is very difficult. To become someone is very easy - all that you need is to be a hypocrite, which is not much of a problem. Deep down you remain the same, but on the surface you go on painting yourself according to some image.
Meditation is not a process of learning how to meditate; it is the very inquiry into what is meditation. To inquire into what is meditation, the mind must free itself from what it has learnt about meditation, and the freeing of the mind from what it has learnt is the beginning of meditation.
Ideally, when Christians meet, as Christians do, to take counsel together, their purpose is not ( or should not be) to ascertain what is the mind of the majority but what is the mind of the Holy Spirit - something which may be quite different.