This is a collection of quotes with a Zoom-Out theme or in some related way inspirational.
“Zoom out and look at this from space not with your ear to the ground”
– Seneca, Stoic philosopher
“Try not to react merely in the moment. Pull back from the situation. Take a wider view. Compose yourself.”
– Epictetus, Stoic philosopher, A.D. 55 – 135
“Child, you have to learn to see things in the right proportions. Learn to see great things great and small things small.”
― Corrie Ten Boom
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
– Shakespeare’s Hamlet
“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, Man’s Search for Meaning
“Reality is plural”
– Robert Anton Wilson
“Our species has been so successful not in spite of our inability to see reality but because of it.”
– Beau Lotto
“The map is not the territory”
– Alfred Korzybski, 1933
“The reason we suffer is we don’t see the world clearly”
– The Buddha, 563 – 483 BC
‘The mind abhors a vacuum”
– Jon Eltser
“We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are”
– Anaïs Nin
“People are not disturbed by events but by the view they take of them.”
– Epictetus, Stoic philosopher, A.D. 55 – 135
“Every kind of ignorance in the world all results from not realizing that our perceptions are gambles. We believe what we see and then we believe our interpretation of it, we don’t even know we are making an interpretation most of the time. We think this is reality”
– Robert Anton Wilson
“Strong opinions, weakly held”
– Paul Saffo
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”
– Mark Twain
“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”
– Marcus Aurelius, Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor
“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.”
– The Buddha, 563 – 483 BC
“Draw back and laugh”
– Seneca, Stoic philosopher
“We suffer more in imagination than in reality”
– Seneca, Stoic philosopher
“As you think, so you become…..Our busy minds are forever jumping to conclusions, manufacturing and interpreting signs that aren’t there.”
– Epictetus, Stoic philosopher, A.D. 55 – 135
“You should cage your monkey mind in a journal”
– Seneca, Stoic philosopher
“Comparison is the thief of joy”
– Theodore Roosevelt
“Happiness is reality minus expectations “
– Theodore Roosevelt
“Evolution did not design us to see reality clearly – only to enhance our chances of passing on our genes”
– Robert Wright, Journalist / Evolutionary Psychologist
“Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning, we recreate ourselves. Through learning, we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning, we re-perceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning, we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life. There is within each of us a deep hunger for this type of learning.”
– Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline
“Response-ability is the ABILITY to choose our response to any circumstance or condition”
– Stephen R Covey
“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”
― Epictetus, Stoic philosopher
“Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.”
– Robert Wright, Journalist / Evolutionary Psychologist
“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”
– Wayne Dyer
“Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.”
― Wayne W. Dyer
“So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You’d better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can’t rearrange the universe.”
– Isaac Asimov (1920 – 1992)
“Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation”
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
“What we see depends mainly on what we look for.”
― John Lubbock
“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
– Edgar Allan Poe
“We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”
– Epictetus, Stoic philosopher, A.D. 55 – 135
“To change ourselves effectively, we first had to change our perceptions.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective
“What people in the world think of you is really none of your business.”
― Martha Graham
“Ask yourself, “How are my thoughts, words and deeds affecting my friends, my spouse, my neighbour, my child, my employer, my subordinates, my fellow citizens?”
– Epictetus, Stoic philosopher, A.D. 55 – 135
“Life is 10 percent what you make it and 90 percent how you take it.”
― Irving Berlin
“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”
― Marcus Aurelius
“Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.”
– Epictetus, Stoic philosopher, A.D. 55 – 135
“Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. ”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
― Oscar Wilde
“Freedom and happiness are won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.”
– Epictetus, Stoic philosopher, A.D. 55 – 135
“The task is…not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.”
― Erwin Schrödinger
“Some people see the glass half full. Others see it half empty. I see a glass that’s twice as big as it needs to be.”
― George Carlin
“Look at everything as though you are seeing it either for the first or last time, then your time on earth will be filled with glory”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
“You will always define events in a manner which will validate your agreement with reality.”
― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
“When we name things correctly, we comprehend them correctly, without adding information or judgements that aren’t there. Does someone bathe quickly? Don’t say be bathes poorly, but quickly.
Name the situation as it is, don’t filter it through your judgments. Give your assent only to that which is actually true
– Epictetus, Stoic philosopher, A.D. 55 – 135
“When it seems like the sky is about to collapse, relax, that’s just the roof caving in.”
― Jarod Kintz, Seriously delirious, but not at all serious
“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
“One person’s craziness is another person’s reality.”
― Tim Burton
“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life
“The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up.”
― Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club)
“Every experience, no matter how bad it seems, holds within it a blessing of some kind. The goal is to find it”
– The Buddha, 563 – 483 BC
“Listen first, talk second; see things from another person ‘s point of view before sharing your own”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective
“The best things in life aren’t things.”
― Art Buchwald
“If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.”
– Seneca
“You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.”
– The Buddha, 563 – 483 BC
“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
– Albert Einstein
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“All descriptions of reality are temporary hypotheses.”
– The Buddha, 563 – 483 BC
“Complete objectivity is not an option. We are all subjective about the way we respond to ‘what is,’ whether it’s the people we encounter, the circumstances in our lives, or ourselves. What we can do is reduce our subjectivity – what I call ‘I see, therefore it is.”
– Elizabeth Thornton
“Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.”
– John Searle
“The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.”
– Hans-Georg Gadamer
“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
– Socrates
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”
– Heraclitus
“We are happy when people/things conform and unhappy when they don’t. People and events don’t disappoint us, our models of reality do. It is my model of reality that determines my happiness or disappointments.”
― Stefan Zweig, Chess Story
“We have many ways of creating our realities based on the different ways we perceive.”
― Zamm Zamudio, Intuition: Discover the Inner Workings of our World – Book 1
“No matter how it is accomplished, the vu ja de mentality is the ability to keep shifting opinion and perception. It means shifting our focus from objects or patterns that in the foreground to those in the background, between what psychologists call “figure” versus “ground”. It means thinking of things that are usually assumed to be negative as positive, and vice versa. It can mean reversing assumptions about cause and effects, or what matters most versus least. It mean not travelling through life on automatic pilot. Many of the weird ideas in this book are about how to make the vu ja de mentality a way of life in a company.”
– Robert I Sutton, from ‘Weird Ideas That Work: How to Build a Creative Company’
“High emotional arousal affects how we view the world; it distorts and limits our perception, frequently convincing us that our view of reality is the only accurate one. This black-and-white, either/or style of emotional thinking evolved to simplify the choices available to us, in order to aid survival.”
– Mark Tyrrell, New Ways of Seeing
“When we are highly emotionally aroused—for example, when we are extremely angry—it is difficult to see the wider picture, the other person’s point of view.”
– Mark Tyrrell, New Ways of Seeing
“…when someone is stuck in a particular thinking style and unconsciously assumes that their (limited, negative) view is the only perspective, then a major shift can occur when another wider, more flexible, and positive view is unexpectedly and unarguably demonstrated to them.”
– Mark Tyrrell, New Ways of Seeing
“It is important, therefore (especially considering that someone who is seriously depressed may see suicide as his or her ‘only option’), to help depressed clients to calm down as quickly as possible so that they can see the wider picture of their situation and realise that their model of reality is just that: a model.”
– Mark Tyrrell, New Ways of Seeing
“Just as calm water will reflect the reality around it much more accurately and evenly, so too will the human mind. When it is calm, it can think much more clearly and flexibly, and is less prone to all the stirred-up distortions of depression.”
– Mark Tyrrell, New Ways of Seeing
“I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on . . . reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.”
– Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642)
“Seeing is not believing—it is only seeing.”
– George MacDonald, from The Princess And The Goblin