Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it.

A window — it’s more entertaining than TV. Just ask a cat looking out, or a man looking in on a life he desires.

La mente es mucho mas interesante que el cuerpo.

Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.

She drew the line at television. It took no effort to watch – it was infinitely more beneficial to the soul, and to the intelligence, to read or to listen – and what she imagined there was on TV appalled her.

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

"It is better," says Eckhard, "to look at the wall. You look at the wall, you have your own thoughts. You look at he TV, you have the thoughts of the state."

I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.

Minds differ still more than faces.

I now believe that television itself, the medium of sitting in front of a magic box that pulses images at us endlessly, the act of watching TV, per se, is mind crushing. It is soul deadening, dehumanizing, soporific in a poisonous way, ultimately brutalizing. It is, simply put so you cannot mistake my meaning, a bad thing.

Having spent years observing my mind in meditation, I find such sudden transitions from happiness to suffering both fascinating and rather funny — and merely witnessing them goes a long way toward restoring my equanimity. My mind begins to seem like a video game: I can either play it intelligently, learning more in each round, or I can be killed in the same spot by the same monster, again and again.

It is not the things we see, but the mind we see them with, which makes the real interest of travelling.

Television and the computer world are great empty shadow-lands. To look at something that can gaze back at you, or that has a reserve and depth, can heal your eyes and deepen your sense of vision.

Eve from the rib, Venus from foam,
Minerva from Jupiter’s head –
All three were more real than me.

When he isn’t looking at me,
I try to catch my reflection
on the wall. And I see the nail
where a picture used to be.