Each person paints their picture of reality with a brush dipped in the pigments of the past.
— Jerry Andrus (Skeptical Inquirer, March/April ’95, p.7)
Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
"All the time we are aware of millions of things around us--these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road--aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think. From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world."
— Robert Pirsig, (Zen & Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance; p.69)
We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are
— Old Talmudic saying
It is not the event itself that is important, but rather our reaction to that event. “Rather than altering the external world to bring it into line with one's desires, (one should) set those desires so that they are in line with the way the external world actually is.”
— Epictetus (55-135 A.D.; Stoicism)
Unhappiness = image – reality.
— Dennis Prager
The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions & not on our circumstances.
— Martha Washington
One does not laugh because one is happy; one is happy because one laughs.
— Mireille Guiliano
Happiness doesn't depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude.
— Dale Carnegie
There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
— William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)
If you don't like something change it; if you can't change it, change the way you think about it.
— Mary Engelbreit
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.
— William James
Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens
— Kahlil Gibran
A monk asks a superior if it is permissible to smoke while praying. The superior says certainly not. Next day the monk asks if it is permissible to pray while smoking. That, says the superior, is not merely permissible, it is admirable. The moral of the story is that much depends on how a thing is presented
— George Will
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
— Marcus Aurelius
The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
— John Milton (1608-1674) [Paradise Lost]
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms-to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
— Viktor Frankl
While we may not be able to control all that happens to us, we can control what happens inside us.
— Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Change your thoughts and you change your world.
— Norman Vincent Peale (1898 - 1993)
Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.
— Count Leo Tolstoy
No man is happy who does not think himself so.
— Publilius Syrus, Maxims (100 BC)
Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.
— Abraham Lincoln
Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.
— Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
Men are not disturbed by things, but the view they take of things.
— Epictetus (55-135 A.D.)
What about things like bullets?
— Herb Kimmel, Behavioralist, Professor of Psychology, upon hearing the above quote (1981) of Epictetus: “Men are not disturbed by things, but the view they take of things."
There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size.
— The movie: “Adaptations”
The effectiveness of our memory banks is determined not by the total number of facts we take in, but the number we wish to reject.
— Jon Wynne-Tyson
I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
— Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble across a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it representative of a whole class.
— Walter Lippman, (1929)
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
— William James
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices – just recognize them.
— Edward R Murrow
A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.
— Albert Einstein
We must train ourselves not to see the world only through our own eyes.
— Michael Levine
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
— Albert Einstein
Enlightenment is illusion-free reality.
— Buddha, [Siddhartha Gautama] (?563-?483 B.C.E.)
