Quotes about open-mindedness

Whenever I hear people clucking about the decline of civilization, what's wrong with young people, how vulgar popular culture is, how confusing and frightening they find the internet, alarms go off. I know I'm around somebody whose hinges are rusting. Death will be bad enough, but for me, this early harbinger is more fearsome, because a part of one's spirit and openness and ability to learn and grow disappears.

I believe one of the most sacrificial acts of love adoptive parents can do is to give up their preconceptions and agendas about what their child's views "should" be and be open to hear the conflicting emotions and thoughts their child often experiences.

When you read without an open mind, you're already filtering ideas and intended message. Selective reading contributes to wilful ignorance.

Just remember that in most things, right or wrong depends on where you’re standing at the moment. My father’s people would have thought having your life’s mate picked out for you by your parents to be … well, barbaric.” As Talon’s expression started to darken, Caleb added, “No offense intended, but I’m pointing out that things look the way they do because that is how you were taught as a child. And the rest of the world is vastly different from what a child can imagine.

At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.

Having an open mind is the most important precondition for creatingnew ideas.

Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

If you open your mind more than you open your mouth, you will open your world more than you open your doubt.

Elliston thought consistency less important than vitality and intelligence and passion.

1. A Cup of Tea Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), recieved a university professor who came to inqure about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he could no longer restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!" "Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your up?

... But these skeptics are only selectively skeptical. They think themselves enlightened for resisting all this new proof and remaining steadfast in mistrusting anything that someone else says. But it is a false enlightenment to accept only those ideas that align with one's worldview and reject those that don't.

Say 'Not Yet.' It's best to leave your options open.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.

We must quit thinking we know everything, and quit placing "knowledge" over kindness and compassion.

Few minds are spacious; few even have an empty place in them or can offer some vacant point. Almost all have narrow capacities and are filled by some knowledge that blocks them up. What a torture to talk to filled heads, that allow nothing from the outside to enter them! A good mind, in order to enjoy itself and allow itself to enjoy others, always keeps itself larger than its own thoughts. And in order to do this, these thoughts must be given a pliant form, must be easily folded and unfolded, s

Travel is the best teacher. The only way to an open mind is by taking a plane out into the open world.

If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain.

People who don’t know how to use their minds can’t really know how to use their hearts either.

Live with an open mind and an open heart. Always choose love over fear and kindness over cruelty.

No person can open another person, All we can do is wait. And then work with the openness when it occur.s.

If you cannot be open-minded, then you do not possess your ideas, your ideas possess you.

If someone chooses to live a certain way, and it doesn’t infringe on anyone’s freedom, it’s their choice to make.

Have a humble heart & an open-mind and you'll soon be given glimpses beyond the veil of your beliefs and understandings... growing wiser, and believing deeper.

Genius has less to do with the size of your mind than how open it is.

[B]egin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won’t come in.

I can't afford to say yes to all my staff's desires, but one thing is certain – I can't afford the outrageous cost of not listening to their requests.

What advantage has the person who will not listen over the one who cannot hear?

Keep a logical but open mind. What one may pass off as a psychological dysfunction could be a burst of imagination at its finest.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they can see nothing but sea.

Remain open-minded, even when you believe yourself to be a king among peasants. You never know what blessings can be gained or crises averted just by listening.

Some people like living in black and white worlds. Let them stay there. Appreciate all the colors you see in your world though.

Open-mindedness is a precondition for generating new ideas, but focusing on the problem is almost equally important.

Create inclusion - with simple mindfulness that others might have a different reality from your own.

The author determines that the bitterest struggles are for one side of the truth to the suppression of the other side.

Renewal requires opening yourself up to new ways of thinking and feeling

The beliefs which we have the most warrant for have no safeguard, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

It is impossible to describe a landscape so validly as to exclude all other descriptions, for no one can see the landscape in all its aspects at the same time, and no single view can prevent the existence and validity of other equally possible views.

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank.

The author gives an interesting naval etymology of the word "opportunity". It referred to days in which sailing ships had to wait outside a port for the appropriate tide, which then was their chance until the next tide.

That just goes to show, remarked Pearlie, that you must never judge a woman in a kimono or a bathing suit.

The spiritual freedom we seek cannot be found by grasping at, retreating to, or protecting our perceived safe spaces. Our freedom lies in remaining open continuously, not only to Life's changes but also to the Divine Light within us and others.

A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities that people spend their whole lives working on. A Democratic Spirit's constituent rigor and humility and self-honesty are, in fact, so hard to maintain on certain issues that it's almost irresistibly tempting to fall in with some established dogmatic camp and to follow that camp's line on the issue and to let your position harden within the camp and become

Always be respectful and open-minded when listening to another man's beliefs. What you reject today could be your mantra tomorrow. Man's evolution is all about transformations. An unexpected experience you have one day can change you forever.

I'm too open minded that I don't know what to mind anymore.

Sit down before fact with an open mind. Be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads or you learn nothing. Don’t push out figures when facts are going in the opposite direction.

What few rules appear to be in place are all made up.

When one opens a book, one should also open one's mind.

No one has the right to force his or her way of life on anyone else.

We can’t expect others to abandon their values any more than we would forsake our own.

One of the biggest contradictions in self-proclaimed open-mindedness is to say that we're all one but when a true bigot comes around tell him we're all different. It's usually the case that neither side is correct. One might have the right to do something, anything, but sure enough, that doesn't mean it's right and a benefit to other people.

It is never too late to give up your prejudices

One is not required to like a movie in order to learn from it. Our personal views provide a legitimate perspective, as long as we recognize and acknowledge how they may color our interpretation.

Most commanders wanted as many good sources of information as possible. MacArthur was focused on limiting and controlling his sources of intelligence.

The Perfect Way is only difficult for those who pick and choose;Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear.Make a hairbreadth difference, and Heaven and Earth are set

Go forward in your beliefs and teachings, educate the open-minded and be humble to the ones who aren’t.

...sometimes when you are lost for direction, you are open to a new way of seeing.

Open your eyes, mind and heart - and then (only then) you will see

I would rather have strong enemies than a world of passive individualists. In a world of passive individualists nothing seems worth anything simply because nobody stands for anything. That world has no convictions, no victories, no unions, no heroism, no absolutes, no heartbeat. That world has rigor mortis.

The experience of seeing how our thought and our words and our ideas have been confined by the limitation of our experience is one which is salutary and is in a certain sense good for a man's morals as well as good for his pleasure. It seems to us [scientists] that this is an opening up of the human spirit , avoiding its provincialism and narrowness.

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.

If only I could spend all days surrounded by people brave enough to open their hearts for real.

Don’t limit yourself, discover new areas of expertise

Be flexible and adapt easily to new things

When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?

The thing is, it's very dangerous to have a fixed idea. A person with a fixed idea will always find some way of convincing himself in the end that he is right

Don’t be too stereotyped, be ready to explore new opportunities

Don’t be too rigid, always be ready and eager to make new discoveries

All the systems which explain so precisely why the world is as it is and why it can never be otherwise, have always called forth in me the same kind of uneasiness one has when face to face with the regulations displayed under the glaring lights of a prison cell. Even if one had been born in prison and had never seen the stars or seas or woods, one would instinctively know of timeless freedom in unlimited space.My evil star, however, had fated me to be born in times when only the sharply demarcat

We have eyelids but not earlids, for the ears are the portals of learning, and Nature wanted to keep them wide open.

A different species a different set of values a world completely unlike your own. There is a feeling you can only get when you meet the unknown and open your mind. - Nakajima (Gin no Saji)

The one thing that I want every single child to have experienced at some point in their life, as part of their education, is to have some idea they hold to be true, and at the very basis of their being, proved to be wrong.Because that opens your mind to the realization that the world is different than you thought it would be, and you have to begin to open your mind to the possibilities of existence.And opening your mind frees you, it doesn't constrain you. It makes the world more wonderful, more

Let us not despise the woman who is neither mother nor daughter nor wife. Let us not limit our esteem to family life, narrow our tolerance to simple egotism. Given that heaven rejoices more at the repentance of one sinner than over a hundred good men who have never sinned, let us endeavor to make heaven rejoice. We may be rewarded with interest. Let us leave along the path the alms of our forgiveness for those whose earthly desires have marooned them, so that a divine hope may save them, and, as

Past experience doesn't go away, so the secret is to accept, embrace and learn from it. However the key to the secret, is to keep it at bay and be open minded about the future from the second after the experience and never let the experience be the bar or commission of anything thereafter.

Let yourself be open and life will be easier. A spoon of salt in a glass of water makes the water undrinkable. A spoon of salt in a lake is almost unnoticed.

An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man's mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut. He can say nothing to the purpose. Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing either the Tao or anything else.

Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.

Beware: open-mindedness will often say, 'Everything is permissible except a sharp opinion.

If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.

To be evenminded is the greatest virtue.Wisdom is to speakthe truth and actin keeping with its nature.

The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.

Open your eyesOpen your earsOpen your mindOpen your heartThey are your portals to joy

What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one's glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet, in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins

Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

No harm in listening. Alexei's a child, not a wizard. We don't lose control of our brains by listening.

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.

Flexibility requires an open mind and a welcoming of new alternatives.

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

When the doors begin to close, the mind begins to open.

It's not enough to open your eyes. You must open your heart as well.

Always hear others out and remain open-minded the day you think you know everything is the day you have the most yet to learn.

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

It's a huge disservice to classify all minds as either closed or open. I find the best minds are closed by openable windows.

A man who believes everything can be explained by science is just as ignorant as someone who believes everything can be explained by religion.

There’s usually more than one way to complete a task. I will not stay stuck in my ways. I will remain motivated and open-minded.

We Destroy Because We HateWe Hate Because We FearWe Fear Because We Don’t UnderstandWe Don’t Understand Because We Won’t LearnIlluminate your mind & Educate yourself!

Pride is a fallacy. None of us are greater than the sum of our parts.

The perception of other people and the intersubjective world is problematic only for adults. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him. He has no awares of himself or of others as private subjectives, nor does he suspect that all of us, himself included, are limited to one certain point of view of the world. That is why he subjects neither his thoughts, in which he believes as they present themselves, to any sort of criticism. He has no knowledge of