A Quote by Daniel J. Boorstin
The mind is a vagrant thing.... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time.
Related Quotes
The mind is a vagrant thing ... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time.
Answering criticism that the book for which he won a Pulitzer Prize was written in the years he had been employed at the Smithsonian. He specified that did not write on the premises there, but only at home outside of working hours.
There is something about a theatre room that is really like a laboratory for trying things and failing, because you have time to do that, and you can explore something deeply and discard it if it's not working.
From him [Wilard Bennett] I learned how different a working laboratory is from a student laboratory. The answers are not known!
[While an undergraduate, doing experimental measurements in the laboratory of his professor, at Ohio State University.]
I'm always working on something. I wish I had more time for free-thinking and brainstorming new ideas. That's not to say my mind doesn't wander, but I find myself wishing for more of that kind of time.
I don't really like to write at a desk. I like to write when driving in a car. ... Once you're working on it, you're working on it all the time, and sometimes stuff'll come in the middle of the night, in a dream or something. Your mind is working on it all the time.
The consciousness of a general idea has a certain "unity of the ego" in it, which is identical when it passes from one mind to another. It is, therefore, quite analogous to a person, and indeed, a person is only a particular kind of general idea.
When it comes to working on identities, a lot of the time I find myself working with a company that has been around for a while. No matter what they say their goal is, the history and the impression that they have already made in the minds of the public is a real thing that you have to deal with.
You know, I'm behind my company. My company has been a big part of my life. And it's not that I been buying a company or that my father bought a company and tried to do something out of it. You know, it's not the same thing. It's my name, it's my company, it's my signature.
I talked to the record company about what I had in mind. They said they wanted something lush. I figured the best thing to do was let them hear what I had in mind.
Once I get on something, once I have something that I'm working on, then I become very obsessive. In a good way. I mean,... is there a positive way to say obsessive? It's a good thing and if you're out there and you're working on something right now and you're crazed and you're up in the middle of the night, or you can't stop thinking about it, or you have to keep reading other things about the subject that you're working on or whatever. That's good and I think that's necessary creatively.
My own work has been influenced by my years of teaching in that it's very hard for me to be cynical. When you're working with emerging, brilliant talent, you have to believe in the future. It makes me hungry, as a 65-year-old. I'm not thinking about the time that is behind me. I'm thinking of these people that I watch to catch up with and be in their company.
Why spend a day in the library when you can learn the same thing by working in the laboratory for a month?
To the extent a person makes, invents or thinks something that is new to him, he may be said to have performed a creative act.
If I was to spend time working out what the record company got - and those in that team of people around us - I would lose my mind.
The wise man contents himself with what he has, until such time as he invents something better.
Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well-ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.
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