Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American Poet
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American Poet
When I was research head of General Motors and wanted a problem solved, I’d place a table outside the meeting room with a sign: LEAVE SLIDE RULES HERE! If I didn’t do that, I’d find some engineer reaching for his slide rule. Then he’d be on his feet saying, “Boss you can’t do that.”
—Charles F. Kettering (1876–1958) American Inventor, Entrepreneur, Businessperson
Man’s mind stretched by a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–94) American Physician, Essayist
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
—Buddhist Teaching
There are in life as many aspects as attitudes towards it; and aspects change with attitudes… Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different. Life would undergo a change of appearance because we ourselves had undergone a change in attitude.
—Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) New Zealand-born British Author
Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it “creative observation.” Creative viewing.
—William S. Burroughs (1914–97) American Novelist, Poet, Short Story Writer, Painter
To perceive means to immobilize… we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941) French Philosopher, Evolutionist
One drop has just fallen.
It is a precious moment, and one that is full of poignancy. In surrendering to gravity and slipping off the leaf, the drop loses its previous identity and joins the vastness of the water below. We can imagine that it must have trembled before it fell, just on the edge between the known and the unknowable.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho) (1931–90) Indian Spiritual Teacher
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.
—Harper Lee (1926–2016) American Novelist
Men are disturbed not by things that happen, but by their opinion of the things that happen.
—Epictetus (55–135) Ancient Greek Philosopher
The place one’s in, though, doesn’t make any contribution to peace of mind: it’s the spirit that makes everything agreeable to oneself.
—Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (c.4 BCE–65 CE) Roman Stoic Philosopher, Statesman, Tragedian
A stumbling block to the pessimist is a stepping-stone to the optimist.
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American First Lady, Diplomat, Humanitarian
You must have absolute faith in your own perceptions of truth. Never act in haste or hurry; be deliberated in everything; wait until you know the true way.
—Wallace Wattles (1860–1911) American New Thought Author
The grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence. Fences have nothing to do with it. The grass is greenest where it is watered. When crossing over fences, carry water with you and tend the grass wherever you may be.
—Robert Fulghum (b.1937) American Unitarian Universalist Author, Essayist, Clergyman
To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize there stands myself. And what I do not recognize I shall continue not to recognize.
—Andre Breton (1896–1966) French Poet, Essayist, Critic
Genuine confidence is a way of thinking about yourself and your abilities. Confidence is your perception of your own potential; it’s a kind of long-term thinking that powers you through the obstacles and tough times, helping you solve problems and putting you in the way of success. Your confidence is quite a separate matter from your social skills.
—John Eliot (b.1971) American Psychologist, Academic
Hurry is a manifestation of fear; he who fears not has plenty of time. If you at with perfect faith in your own perceptions of truth, you will never be too late or too early; and nothing will go wrong.
—Wallace Wattles (1860–1911) American New Thought Author
Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
The dung beetle, seeing its child on the wall, thinks it sees a pearl on a thread.
—Arabic Proverb
What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.
—C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) Irish-born British Academic, Author, Literary Scholar
Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.
—Ezra Pound (1885-1972) American Poet, Translator, Critic
To see what is right, and not do it, is want of courage, or of principle.
—Confucius (551–479 BCE) Chinese Philosopher
This girl doesn’t, it seems, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the “curiosity” level.
—Unknown
What’s the good of dragging up sufferings which are over, of being unhappy now just because you were then.
—Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (c.4 BCE–65 CE) Roman Stoic Philosopher, Statesman, Tragedian
By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish Critic, Journalist, Philosopher
The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist
The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.
—Carlos Castaneda (1925–98) Peruvian-born American Anthropologist, Author
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.
—Unknown
The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
Nothing in life is so hard that you can’t make it easier by the way you take it.
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945) American Novelist
Being born in a duck yard does not matter, if only you are hatched from a swan’s egg.
—Hans Christian Andersen (1805–75) Danish Author, Poet, Short Story Writer
Penetration seems a kind of inspiration; it gives me an idea of prophecy.
—George Greville, 2nd Earl of Warwick (1746–1816) British Nobleman, Politician
The eye of a human being is a microscope, which makes the world seem bigger than it really is.
—Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) Lebanese-born American Philosopher, Poet, Painter, Theologian, Sculptor
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
—Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born Physicist
The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.
—Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915) French Poet, Novelist, Critic
Light travels faster than sound. That’s why most people seem bright until you hear them speak.
—Unknown
The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances. We carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us in our minds wherever we go.
—Martha Washington (1731–1802) American First Lady
Whatever we focus on is bound to expand. Where we see the negative, we call forth more negative. And where we see the positive, we call forth more positive. Having loved and lost, I now love more passionately. Having won and lost, I now win more soberly. Having tasted the bitter, I now savor the sweet.
—Marianne Williamson (b.1952) American Activist, Author, Lecturer
We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.
—Epictetus (55–135) Ancient Greek Philosopher
Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is…The only problem in your life is your mind’s resistance to life as it unfolds.
—Dan Millman (b.1946) American Children’s Books Writer, Sportsperson
The experiences of camp life show that a man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress. 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 way. The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even in the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to life.
—Viktor Frankl (1905–97) Austrian Psychiatrist, Psychotherapist
Every beauty which is seen here below by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all come…
—Michelangelo (1475–1564) Italian Painter, Sculptor, Architect, Poet, Engineer
We like to divine others, but do not like to be divined ourselves.
—Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613–80) French Writer
The gaze should be large and broad. … In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things.
—Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese Samurai Warrior, Artist
Observation more than books, experience rather than persons, are the prime educators.
—Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) American Teacher, Writer, Philosopher
There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67) American Nuclear Physicist
The heart has eyes which the brain knows nothing of.
—Charles Henry Parkhurst (1842–1933) American Clergyman, Civic Reformer
If you look at your life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) Irish Novelist, Short-story Writer
Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand of it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–81) Russian Novelist, Essayist, Writer