Echoes

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

I have endowed everyone with a temperament of his own, given everyone an idiom of his own; so that what is praise for him is blame for thee, what is honey for him is poison for thee, what is light for him is fire for thee, what is rose for him is thorn for thee, what is good for him is evil for thee, what is beautiful for him is ugly for thee. In the people of Hindustan the idiom of Hindustan is praiseworthy; in the people of Sind, the idiom of Sind is praiseworthy. I do not see the outward and the speech; I see the inward and the state [of feeling]. For the heart is the substance and speech an accident. So, the accident is subservient, the substance is the [real] object. The religion of love stands apart from all religions. For lovers the [only] religion and creed is God.

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

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.

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

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.

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.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people... Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

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

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

We cling to our own point of view, as though everything depended on it. Yet our opinions have no permanence; like autumn and winter, they gradually pass away.

The fault is in the one who blames. Spirit sees nothing to criticize.

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

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men — that is genius.

It is not things that disturb us, but our judgments about things. For example, death is nothing terrible, for if it were, it would have appeared so to Socrates; but the judgment that death is terrible — that is the terrible thing.

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...

There are no facts, only interpretations.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

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

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything.

How many things, too, are looked upon as quite impossible until they have been actually effected?

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

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.

Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in the imperfection is perfect reality.

When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.