Quotes about Perspective

It's not what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us that hurts us.

Anytime we think the problem is "out there," that thought is the problem.

We create many negative situations by simply assuming that our expectations are self-evident and that they are clearly understood and shared by other people.

It becomes obvious that if we want to make relatively minor changes in our lives, we can perhaps appropriately focus on our attitudes and behaviors. But if we want to make significant, quantum change, we need to work on our basic paradigms. In

Many of us find that increasing our speed only makes things worse.

It taught me that we must look at the lens through which we see the world, as well as at the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world.

We're often so busy cutting through the undergrowth we don't even realize we're in the wrong jungle.

How many times have you made assumptions similar to the store manager's? It's easy to do, because we all see things in different ways. We all have different paradigms or frames of reference—like eyeglasses through which we see the world. We see the world not as it is, but as we are—or sometimes as we are conditioned to see it.

Seek first to understand. Before the problems come up, before you try to evaluate and prescribe, before you try to present your own ideas—seek to understand.

Each of us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are—or, as we are conditioned to see it. When we open our mouths to describe what we see, we in effect describe ourselves, our perceptions, our paradigms. When other people disagree with us, we immediately think something is wrong with them.

Being is seeing in the human dimension. And what we see is highly interrelated to what we are.

While we can't always control what happens to us, we can always choose how we react to life's challenges.