We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
—Anaïs Nin

Reality is frequently inaccurate.
—Douglas Adams

Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality.
—R. Buckminster Fuller

It is inconceivable that anything should be existing.
—Celia Green

We need to take dreams more literally, and waking life more symbolically.
—Robert Moss

What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself.
—Lewis Mumford

Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.
—Marilynne Robinson

Of course, sometimes it’s quite difficult to know if you’re hallucinating. You might hallucinate a silver pen on your desk right now and never suspect it’s not real—because its presence is plausible. It’s easy to spot a hallucination only when it’s bizarre. For all we know, we hallucinate all the time.
—David Eagleman

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
—Barbara Kingsolver

All our previous positions are now exposed as absurd. But people don’t draw the obvious conclusion: it must also mean then that our present situation is absurd.
—Terence McKenna

Beware the stories you read or tell: subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
—Ben Okri

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
—David Foster Wallace

Einstein’s space is no closer to reality than van Gogh’s sky. The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist’s discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer’s frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrandt nude differs from a nude by Manet.
—Arthur Koestler

When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.
—Bill Bryson

I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
—John Cage

It’s in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced, and Photoshopped world very dangerous.
―Brené Brown

You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.
—Maimonides

Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.
—George Saunders

When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul—then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness!
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, who wrote this hours after nearly being executed by a firing squad

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
—Henry David Thoreau

Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.
—Learned Hand

Every day of our lives we are on the verge of making those changes that would make all the difference.
—Mignon McLaughlin

Everything in life is just for a while.
―Philip K. Dick

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
—Kurt Vonnegut

All is pattern, all life, but we can’t always see the pattern when we’re part of it.
—Belva Plain

Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartedness that requires the true courage—however often we are hurt as a result of it.
—Erica Jong

The great art of life is sensation; to feel that we exist, even in pain.
—Lord Byron

wanderer, there is no path,
the path is made by walking.
—Antonio Machado

If you don’t become the ocean you’ll be seasick every day.
—Leonard Cohen

I should be suspicious of what I want.
—Rumi

It is never too late to be what you might have been.
—George Eliot

The best way out is always through.
—Robert Frost

Study nothing except in the knowledge that you already knew it. Worship nothing except in adoration of your true self. And fear nothing except in the certainty that you are your enemy’s begetter and its only hope of healing.
—Clive Barker

It is human nature to think wisely and to act in an absurd fashion.
—Anatole France

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.  
―Marcel Proust

I think I don’t regret a single excess of my responsive youth—I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn’t embrace.
—Henry James

You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.
—Colette

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
—Arthur Miller

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. What do I care about knowledge? All I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral, or what-not.
—D.H. Lawrence

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
—Ernest Hemingway

Between two evils, I generally like to pick the one I never tried before.
—Mae West

Each small task of everyday life is part of the total harmony of the universe.
—Saint Thérèse de Lisieux

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
—Cormac McCarthy

Don't fear failure. Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.
—Bruce Lee

I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.
―Sylvia Plath

I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.
—Nikos Kazantzakis

Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.
—Jim Horning

You live out the confusions until they become clear.
—Anaïs Nin

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
—Marie Curie

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

I’m no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is “Yes.”
—Leonard Bernstein

I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself.
—Joseph Conrad

Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.
—Farrah Gray

Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
―Margaret Atwood

Don’t be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.
—Bertolt Brecht

It is sad to grow old but nice to ripen.
—Bridgette Bardot

We are born in simplicity but die of complications.
—Pete Seeger

Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.
—Haruki Murakami

You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.
—W. Somerset Maugham

A multitude of small delights constitutes happiness.
―Charles Baudelaire

If only we’d stop trying to be happy we’d have a pretty good time.
—Edith Wharton

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
—Mohandas Gandhi

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
—Willa Cather

Waste no more time arguing about what a good person should be. Be one.  
—Marcus Aurelius

Evil is boring. Cynicism is pointless. Fear is a bad habit. Despair is lazy. Hopelessness is self-indulgent. On the other hand: Joy is fascinating. Love is an act of heroic genius. Pleasure is our birthright. Chronic ecstasy is a learnable skill.
—Rob Brezsny

What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.
—Colette

The mind is everything. What you think, you become.  
—Gautama Buddha

At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.
—Lao Tzu

The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.
—Mohandas Gandhi

Imagine awaking from a torpor having forgotten how your friends and family see you. Perhaps, unchained from everyone’s expectations for how you ought to behave, you could be whoever you liked.
—Christian Jarrett

Living things tend to change unrecognizably as they grow. Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? Flora or fauna, we are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.
—Diane Ackerman

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
—Viktor Frankl

Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds.
—José Ortega y Gasset

I am never upset for the reason I think.
—Helen Schucman

People in a temper often say a lot of silly, terrible things they mean.
—Penelope Gilliatt

Anybody can become angry—that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.
—Aristotle

Anxiety is fear of one’s self.
—Wilhelm Stekel

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.
—D.H. Lawrence

Would you like you if you met you? 
—Tegan and Sara

People focus on role models; it is more effective to find anti-models—people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.
—Nassim N. Taleb

Maturity is reached the day we don’t need to be lied to about anything.
—Frank Yerby

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
 —Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
—George Bernard Shaw

I don’t believe anything, but I have many suspicions.
—Robert Anton Wilson

A wise man once said, Convention is like the shell to the chick, a protection till he is strong enough to break it through.
—Learned Hand

Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.
 ―Mary Karr

What a strange machine man is! You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out comes sighs, laughter, and dreams.
―Nikos Kazantzakis

I am human; nothing human is alien to me.
—Terence

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
—Erich Fromm

The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics.
―Lawrence M. Krauss

Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am.
—Thomas Merton

Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter.
—Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.
—Jane Howard

We are born for cooperation, as are the feet, the hands, the eyelids, and the upper and lower jaws.
—Marcus Aurelius

When you are in love with humanity, you are satisfied with yourself.
—Luigi Pirandello

If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.
—Timothy Leary

He that cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself, for every man hath need to be forgiven.
—Edward Herbert, First Baron Herbert of Cherbury

If you had never condemned, you would not need to forgive.
—Anthony de Mello

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.
—Confucius

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
—Carl Jung

I permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.  
―Booker T. Washington

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.  
—James Baldwin

When you know how to listen, everyone is the guru.
—Ram Dass

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
―George Eliot

We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
—Charles Bukowski

The man who is brutally honest enjoys the brutality quite as much as the honesty. Possibly more.
—Richard Needham

Try to say nothing negative about anybody for three days, for forty-five days, for three months. See what happens to your life.
—Yoko Ono

The longer we live, the more we find we are like other persons.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

To be good we must needs have suffered; but perhaps it is necessary to have caused suffering before we can become better.
—Maurice Maeterlinck

Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.
—Antisthenes

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each person’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
—Abraham Lincoln

It’s the friends that you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.
—Marlene Dietrich

Friendship has splendors that love knows not.
—Mariama Bâ

Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.
―Colette

The animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.
―Henry Beston

He that has no fools, knaves, or beggars in his family was begot by a flash of lightning.
―English proverb

If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.
―Ram Dass

Family life! The United Nations is child’s play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.
―May Sarton

Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children. Now I have six children and no theories.
―John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy.
―Sam Levenson

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
―Oscar Wilde

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.
―Mitch Albom

The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
—Bertrand Russell

The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother’s side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.
—Erich Fromm

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
—James Baldwin

A painting is a symbol for the universe. Inside it, each piece relates to the other. Each piece is only answerable to the rest of that little world. So, probably in the total universe, there is that kind of total harmony, but we get only little tastes of it. That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.
—Corita Kent

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them, and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.
—Marcel Proust

Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

You don’t have to write a book in order to reflect reality. You can also write a book to create reality.
—David Levithan

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.
—Elizabeth Drew

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
—Novalis

I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.
—Flannery O’Connor

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.
—Paul Klee

If you hear a voice within you say, “You cannot paint,”
then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
—Vincent van Gogh

Audience member at a lecture: How do you become a prophet?
Allen Ginsberg: Tell your secrets.

The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
—George Bernard Shaw

Many say that life entered the human body by the help of music, but the truth is that life itself is music.
—Hafiz

You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.
—Charlie Parker

Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.
—Pablo Picasso

We consider the artist a special sort of person. It is more likely that each of us is a special sort of artist.
—Elsa Gidlow