Stephen Covey Quotes

Being unbiased is a lot like being humble: as soon as you think you are, you aren’t. Neither are a finite state of being but a continuous struggle to not allow our perspectives poison our opinions.

A helpful thing for me has always been - this is from a great acting teacher Declan Donnellan - is this beautiful way of expressing how and why people do things that other people may not do. It's a simple sentence that says, 'I understand you; you don't understand me.'

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.

Look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them.... Without knowing it, we are coloring everything, putting our spin on it all.

We can only know others by ourselves.

The world you see is less of an indication about the world and more of an indication about your seeing.

Most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes--but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.

Nobody sees anybody truly, but all through the flaws of their own ego.

we always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others

The world is a mirror for us – whatever you say about others is really how you feel about yourself.

The man who can put himself in the place of other men, who can understand the workings of their minds, need never worry about what the future has in store for him.

I've been criticized for not having perspective in the past and I thought that of myself many times but not there.

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.

Human nature is so constituted, that all see and judge better in the affairs of other men than in their own.

It's presumptuous to say you know how somebody feels.

Show me a man who claims he is objective and I'll show you a man with illusions.

All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.

I think it's important to have perspective and to look at what you don't necessarily want to see.

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

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.'

O, would some Power give us, To see ourselves as others see us!

It is necessary to judge accurately the things that rest on opinion

Remember, we see the world not as it is but as we are. Most of us see through the eyes of our fears and our limiting beliefs and our false assumptions.

I will never actually be able to know what it's like to go through life in someone else's body.

It's critical to be able to see things in other people that sometimes they don't see in themselves.