E. F. Schumacher Quotes

Our consciousness, our ideas, our frame of reference and our belief system determine whether we go to the river of life with a teaspoon, a cup, a bucket or a barrel.

I think perception is important.

Paradigms are like glasses. When you have incomplete paradigms about yourself or life in general, it's like wearing glasses with the wrong prescription. That lens affects how you see everything else.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Our understanding is correlative to our perception.

Not what we experience, but how we perceive what we experience, determines our fate.

Like a pane of glass framing and subtly distorting our vision, mental models determine what we see.

How you feel is not the result of what is happening in your life-it is your interpretation of what is happening.

The world begins with what we believe.

Our perspectives on situations act like a lens through which we view the world.

How you imagine the world determines how you live in it.

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.

We must look at the lens through we see the world, as well as the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world.

There's nothing wrong with the world. What's wrong is our way of looking at it.

Nothing terrible has ever happened except in our thinking. Reality is always good, even in situations that seem like nightmares. The story we tell is the only nightmare that we have lived.

The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies "out there" in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.

A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.

We have the ability to create choice by altering our interpretations of the world.

I think the word "intelligent" dictates a lot about someone's sense of humor, and the terms of reference in your life, the way you interpret something you read or a painting you look at or something.

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

A world view is probably an expression of self.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Attitudes are more important than facts.

Life's all about perceptions.

The perception of what a thing is and the perception of what it means are not separate, either.