Echoes

Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.

External things are not the problem. It's your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now.

In a word, neither death, nor exile, nor pain, nor anything of this kind is the real cause of our doing or not doing any action, but our inward opinions and principles.

I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life than on the nature of those events themselves.

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

Therefore, this terror of the mind and the darkness must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun or the bright light of day, but by the appearance and reasoning of nature.

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

If belief consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how can we believe at will? We cannot control our emotions.... But gradually our will can lead us to the same results by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief.

It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

Nor less I deem that there are Powers / Which of themselves our minds impress; / That we can feed this mind of ours / In a wise passiveness.

Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more — more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges of the like faculty in another. I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them.

Things are not so painful and difficult of themselves, but our weakness or cowardice makes them so.

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.

He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor's or an ordinary man's, it is still a life subject to all human accidents.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying "there are only facts," I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations...

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.

The five colors blind the eye. The five tones deafen the ear. The five flavors dull the taste. Racing and hunting madden the mind. Precious things lead one astray. Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels and not by what he sees. He lets go of that and chooses this.