The Quote Bag

Quotes About Change, Perception and How We Maintain Our Limitations

"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names." - Chinese proverb

"Whatever is received is received according to the nature of the recipient." - Thomas Aquinas

"God aids him who changes." - Spanish proverb

"A quarter of a picture is worth 250 words. - George Carlin

"Each person is a unique individual. Hence, psychotherapy should be formulated to meet the uniqueness of the individual's needs, rather than tailoring the person to fit the Procrustian bed of hypothetical theory of human behavior." - Milton Erickson

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true." - James Branch Cabell

"In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us." - Rainer Maria Rilke

"Character is long-standing habit." - Plutarch

"Belief conditions experience, and experience then strengthens belief." - J. Krishnamurti

"A monster which devours everything - that is familiarity." - Honore de Balzac

"Reality makes no sense at all, except possibly from God's point of view" - Lori Singer

"When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Sit loose in the saddle of fate." - Francis Yeats Brown

"Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible." - Eric Hoffer

"When all we have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." - Anon

"History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake." - Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Ulysses

"Without assumptions there are no dilemmas." - Bubba Free John

"Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food." - Austin O'Malley

"The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. Nor upon a cold stove lid." - Mark Twain

"There is no psychology, only biography and autobiography." - Thomas Szasz

"Character is what you are in the dark." - Dwight L. Moody

"Custom adapts itself to expediency." - Tacitus

"What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts." - George Bernard Shaw

"One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself." - Irvin Yalom

"Certitude drives people mad." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"What you cannot avoid, welcome." - Montenegrin proverb

"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science." - Einstein

"The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best." - Paul Valery

"Never pray for a new king." - Yiddish proverb

"Habit will reconcile us to everything but change." - C.C. Colton

"The most important thing in changing human behavior is the person's motivation." - Milton Erickson

"We not only love ourselves in others, but hate ourselves in others too." - G.C. Lichtenberg

"Our minds ... grow in spots; amd like grease spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it." - William James

"The most unendurable thing, to be sure, the really terrible thing, would be a life without habits, a life which continually required improvisation." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"You seek problems because you need their gifts." - Richard Bach

"Once men are caught up in an event, they cease to be afraid. Only the unknown frightens them." - Saint-Exupery

"The world is my idea" - this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract thought." - Schopenhauer

"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." - Simone Weil

"We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well." - George MacDonald

"The secret thoughts of a person run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave and light, without shame or blame." - Thomas Hobbes

"Without the help of selfishness, the human animal would never have developed. Egoism is the vine by which man hoisted himself out of the swamp and escaped from the jungle." - Blaise Cendrars

"Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning." - Anais Nin

"Definition of tragedy: A hero destroyed by the excess of his virtues" - Aristotle

"Miracles arise from our ignorance of nature, not from nature itself." - Montaigne

"When the eye is cleared of obstacles it sees sharply. Whne the ear is cleared of obstacles it hears well. When the nose is not blocked up, it smells well. When the mouth is cleared, it tastes well. When the mind is clear, it thinks well." - Chuang-Tse

"The horror of that moment," the King went on, "I shall never, never forget!" "You will, though," the Queen said, "if you don't make a memorandum of it." - Lewis Carroll

"The supply of interpretations, like that of advice, greatly exceeds the need for them." - Harry Stack Sullivan

"We must respect the past, remembering that once it was all that was humanly possible." - George Santayana

"The real is empty and the empty real" - Lao Tsu

"The neophyte therapist, as well as the experienced one, is often stunned by the extent of the hostility with which good intentions are met." - Sheldon Roth

"The child wants to do what the adult does, and the adult wants to do what the child does." - Sidney Tarachow

"Our greates pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness." - Eric Hoffer

"Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength." - Charles Lamb

"Habit with him was all the test of truth,

"It must be right: I've done it from my youth." - George Crabbe

"The fact that human conscience remains partially infantile throughout life is the core of human tragedy." - Erik Erikson

"Custom adapts itself to expediency." - Tacitus

"In a good play, everyone is in the right. - Friedrich Hebbel

"The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy." - Lionel Trilling

"To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life." - Robert Louis Stevenson

"Ethical exioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience." - Albert Einstein

"The only time people leave their mothers is when they're ready to go." - Elvin Semrad

"I can't see how you and I, who don't exist, should get to speaking here, and smoke our pipes, for all the world like reality." - Robert Louis Stevenson, Fables

"Sleep with the remembrance of death and rise with the thought that you will not live long." - Uwais el-Qarni

"What we cannot think, we cannot think; we cannot therefore say what we cannot think." - Wittgenstein

"If there's so much meaning in it," said the king, "that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any." - Lewis Carroll

"When I haven't any blue, I use red." - Picasso

"The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest." - Simone Weil

"Taste has no system and no proofs." - Susan Sontag

"It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves." - Walter Lippmann

"The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else." - William James

"Maturity of mind is best shown in slow belief." - Baltasar Gracian

"What is wanted is not the will-to-believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite." - Bertrand Russell

"A system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one of such aspects." - Jorge Luis Borges

"We want to do something and a definition is a means of doing it. If we want certain results then we must use certain meanings or definitions. But no definition has any authority apart from a purpose, or to bar us from other purposes." - I. A. Richards

"People don't use their eyes. They never see a bird, they see a sparrow. They never see a tree, they see a birch. They see concepts." - Joyce Cary

"It is the theory that decides what we can observe." - Einstein

"Platitude: All that is mortal of a departed truth." - Ambrose Bierce

"Prejudice does not mean false ideas, but only ... opinions adopted before examination." - Joseph de Maistre

"Heredity is nothing but stored environment." - Luther Burbank

"Two men were sitting in a cafe and a camel walked past. 'What does that make you think of?' said one. 'Food,' said the other. 'Since when are camels used for food?' said the first. 'No, you see, everything makes me think of food.'" - Sufi proverb.

"Learn a new language and gain a new soul." - Czech proverb

"Only a fairy tale calls a constant condition 'happiness'." - Jakob Burckhardt

"Nothing changes more consistently than the past ... the past that influences our lives (is) not what actually happened but what (we) believe happened." - Gerald W. Johnson

"What is reality but a collective hunch? -- Jane Wagner

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