Cogitate Quotes

“Don't just stand there and nod. The mind observes and cogitates, the heart engages, and I would encourage you to engage with the process.”

“The human mind is a rover, it constantly returns to think about times past, cogitates upon the future, and actively considers the entire range of alternative plans to meet our daily survival demands.”

“I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward.”

“Our essential humanity is dependent upon humankind’s ability to join the past and the future with the present. Recollections and future projections grant us the ability to cogitate, analyze, and evaluate. Contrasting memories enable us to ascertain what is true and false, and determine what is charming, attractive, stunning, or sublime. Remembrance of the past serves to comfort us, awareness of the future offers us hope, while our dutiful engagement in the present is capable of arresting our complete attention.”

“All of us share conscious recognition of our individual self. Each of us is more than a product of our conscious thoughts. The dictation of our unconscious mind also affects our behavior. The unconsciousness cogitates upon problems that are too harsh to submit to conscious resolution. The unconscious mind frequently directs us to take action that a rational, conscious mind would eschew. Resembling a two-sided coin, both our conscious and unconscious minds contribute to our thought processes. Collaborative thoughts lead to action, and repeated actions result in the development of behavior patterns, and ingrained behavior patterns lead to a sense of identity.”

“Consciousness and free will are necessary in order for human beings to live meaningful lives by supplying agency to our intentions. The innate capacity for consciousness and directed free will plays a linchpin role in making human curiosity a viable concept. We would lack an ability to learn without an inquisitive mind and the ability to act. A premeditated act of human free will enables us to apply what we learn and make calculated adjustments when our plans need alteration. Human beings’ cognitive processes and a liberal range of free will allows us to study the past for learning rubrics to employ in the present and cogitate upon a future course of action.”

“Writing entails undertaking a spiritual journey, an exploration of the blemished self that is delightfully challenging, painfully arduous, and unfathomably rewarding. Writing allows an admittedly flawed person to artfully confront their inglorious personal history, examine the present, and cogitate upon the future. Thoughtful writing creates a person’s own precursors: it revises a person’s conception of the past into a more detailed, accurate, and comprehensive philosophical context, alters how a person perceives the “now,” and alters the course and outcome person’s future. Writing is the ultimate psychological experience and an immaculate method to examine a person’s thoughts, debunk a person’s delusion, and analyze a person’s values.”

“How can one person be more real than any other? Well, some people do hide and others seek. Maybe those who are in hiding - escaping encounters, avoiding surprises, protecting their property, ignoring their fantasies, restricting their feelings, sitting out the pan pipe hootchy-kootch of experience - maybe those people, people who won't talk to rednecks, or if they're rednecks won't talk to intellectuals, people who're afraid to get their shoes muddy or their noses wet, afraid to eat what they crave, afraid to drink Mexican water, afraid to bet a long shot to win, afraid to hitchhike, jaywalk, honky-tonk, cogitate, osculate, levitate, rock it, bop it, sock it, or bark at the moon, maybe such people are simply inauthentic, and maybe the jacklet humanist who says differently is due to have his tongue fried on the hot slabs of Liar's Hell. Some folks hide, and some folk's seek, and seeking, when it's mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous can be a form of hiding. But there are folks who want to know and aren't afraid to look and won't turn tail should they find it - and if they never do, they'll have a good time anyway because nothing, neither the terrible truth nor the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of one honest breath of Earth's sweet gas.”

“Nothing complements a fast mind better than a slow tongue. And nothing aggravates a slow mind better than a fast tongue.”