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Mind Quotes by George Orwell

38 Mind quotes by George Orwell

All Mind quotes George Orwell’s page

A childhood book can draw a map that later feels false, according to the quotes. They say the mind builds reality, that control over thoughts shapes the world, and that pain can dim intellectual effort. Nationalist or hateful ideas are described as blocking facts, while learning is treated like a ledger of the mind.

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“He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions.”

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Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

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“We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.”

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He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.

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He had moved from thought to words, and now from words to actions.

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He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.

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“He might be ragged and cold or even starving, but so long as he could read, think and watch for meteors, he…

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If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what…

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Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

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If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true,…

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I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.

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Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case…

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If one harbors anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, though in a sense known to be true,…

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“At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless…

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It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It…

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Do you remember writing in your diary," he said, "that it did not matter whether I was a friend or an enemy,…

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There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind and alter…

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The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a…

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His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every…

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For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that…

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Creeds like pacifism or anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of…

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“He seemed to have lost the power of intellectual effort, now that the stimulus of pain had been removed. He was not…

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You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is…

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All progressive thought has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain ... Hitler, because in…

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The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existance, but survive…

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“Winston was gelatinous with fatigue. Gelatinous was the right word. It has come into his head spontaneously. His body seemed to have…

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So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle…

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While the game of deadlocks and bottle-necks goes on, another more serious game is also being played. It is governed by two…

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“He slowed his pace a little. He was thirty and there was grey in his hair, yet he had a queer feeling…

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It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith-as mysterious as faith itself. Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic;…

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Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

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He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his…

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they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you…

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A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do…

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To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees…

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For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be…

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For after all, what is there behind, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for…

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A scrupulous writer in every sentence that he writes will ask himself. . . What am I trying to say? What words…

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More by George Orwell

In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel.:; Up to 1914 you did…

It was given out that the animals there practised cannibalism, tortured one another with red-hot horseshoes, and had their females in common. This was…

“The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running…

He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the…

“if you took 1 Corinthians, chapter thirteen, and in every verse wrote 'money' instead of 'charity', the chapter had ten times as much meaning…

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became…

“Whitman himself "accepted" a great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of the prairie, he also wanders through…

“But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Whatever the Party holds to…

“And the people under the sky were also very much the same...everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just…

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally…

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to…

And the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at…

“Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution.…