The tower of interpretation
Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so.
As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.
If something is presented as an accepted truth, alternative ways of thinking do not even come up for consideration.
You'll see it when you believe it.
The first principle of practical Stoicism is this: we don’t react to events; we react to our judgments about them, and the judgments are up to us.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
In reality, there are an infinite number of perspectives, but we act as if there were only one.
It is not what is happening to you but rather what is happening in you that determines whether you succeed or fail.
Just because someone doesn't like what you do doesn't mean no one else will. A person's opinion is not The Truth, it's their truth.
Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.
It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.
The mind is what the mind is fed.
The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.
There are more things, Lucilius, that frighten us than injure us, and we suffer more in imagination than in reality.
We can change the way that we think about external events, even where we cannot change them. And we can do something more. We can intelligently change our exposure to events that make us either happy or unhappy.
While you can't control your experiences, you can control your explanations.
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
If everyone could learn that what is right for me does not make it right for anyone else, the world would be a much happier place.
There is so much more that is going right in your world than wrong.
The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.
Things don't change, only the way you look at them.
Nothing has any intrinsic meaning. But if you are going to place a meaning on what is happening, which meaning would you want, the happiness meaning, or the unhappiness meaning? It is your choice, though most people don’t realize it is a choice. This whole discussion, and the idea that you could really choose to be happy and peaceful, may sound utopian to you. Becoming conscious enough to notice when you’re suffering, to notice what meaning you’ve placed on a situation, and to consciously change that meaning, doesn’t come easily.
You see everything is about belief, whatever we believe rules our existence, rules our life.
We see the world, not as it is, but as we are - or, as we are conditioned to see it.
There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.
The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.
Evil is to be found not within things, but in the value judgements which people bring to bear upon things. People can therefore be cured of their ills only if they are persuaded to change their value judgements.
“It is not things that trouble us,” as Epictetus said, “but our judgment about things.”
One of the main reasons we’re so affected by our negative thoughts is that we think our mind has an accurate grasp on reality, and that its conclusions are generally valid. This, however, is a fallacy. Our mind’s view of reality can be, and often is, completely distorted.
True self-confidence is “the courage to be open—to welcome change and new ideas regardless of their source.” Real self-confidence is not reflected in a title, an expensive suit, a fancy car, or a series of acquisitions. It is reflected in your mindset: your readiness to grow.
A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.
We like to think we react to the world as it is, when really we react to a world that exists in our own minds. This inner world is so powerful, it overwhelms our ability to see reality. John Milton, in Paradise Lost, expressed it this way: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
We don’t realize how many of our fixed views of the world are based on limited samples of reality.
I am convinced that life is 10% what happens and 90% how I react to it.
You are what you think. All that you are arises from your thoughts. With your thoughts you make your world.
We must remember that this is not a bad world but a good world in the process of becoming.
Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.
A belief is an absolute but arbitrary mental stance.
It's very dramatic when two people come together to work something out. It's easy to take a gun and annihilate your opposition, but what is really exciting to me is to see people with differing views come together and finally respect each other.
Belief does not require something to be true. It only requires us to believe that it’s true! That’s powerful stuff! That means most of what reality is, to each of us, is based on what we have come to believe—whether it’s true or not!
Whether you call someone a hero or a monster is all relative to where the focus of your consciousness may be.
I am a lover of what is, not because I'm a spiritual person, but because it hurts when I argue with reality.
We don't attach to people or to things; we attach to uninvestigated concepts that we believe to be true in the moment.
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