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Blank Mind Quotes

Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless - like water.

Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless - like water.

Bruce Lee
Blank Mind, Empty Mind, Water
Bruce Lee (2015). “Bruce Lee The Tao of Gung Fu: A Study in the Way of Chinese Martial Art”, p.138, Tuttle Publishing

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.

Vladimir Nabokov
Writing, Blank Mind, Feelings
Vladimir Nabokov (2017). “Lectures on Literature”, p.379, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

You must squeeze out of yourself every sensation, every thought, every image, - mercilessly, without reserve and without remorse: you must search the darkest corners of your heart, the most remote recesses of your brain, - you must search them for the image, for the glamour, for the right expression. And you must do it sincerely, at any cost: you must do it so that at the end of your day's work you should feel exhausted, emptied of every sensation and every thought, with a blank mind and an aching heart, with the notion that there is nothing, - nothing left in you.

Joseph Conrad
Heart, Expression, Blank Mind
Joseph Conrad (2015). “The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad”, p.41, Cambridge University Press

Every morning like a scholar at his first class I prepare a blank mind for the day to write upon.

Bruce Lee
Morning, Writing, Blank Mind

The void is a mouth crying to be filled, a blank mind aching for thought, a cavity desperate for shape. What is not implies what is.

Jack Vance
Blank Mind, Mouths, Shapes
"To Live Forever" by Jack Vance, (Chapter XI, section 1), 1956.

The tourist travels in his own atmosphere like a snail in his shell and stands, as it were, on his own perambulating doorstep to look at the continents of the world. But if you discard all this, and sally forth with a leisurely and blank mind, there is no knowing what may not happen to you.

Freya Stark
Blank Mind, Knowing, Atmosphere
Freya Stark (2011). “Baghdad Sketches: Journeys Through Iraq”, p.11, Tauris Parke Paperbacks

Let me run over the principal steps. We approached the case, you remember, with an absolutely blank mind, which is always an advantage. We had formed no theories. We were simply there to observe and to draw inferences from our observations.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Running, Blank Mind, Steps
Sherlock Holmes in "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box" (1893). In "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter" (1893) Holmes tells Doctor Watson, "All things should be seen exactly as they are."

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