Echoes

I felt before I thought: this is the common lot of humanity.

Men trust their ears less than their eyes.

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

Man is what he believes.

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.

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

The crowd is untruth.

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.

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

You are neither right nor wrong because people agree with you.

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

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

A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.

An action committed in anger is an action doomed to failure.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.

It is not truth that makes man great, but man that makes truth great.

People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

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.

A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.

In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.

Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.