Margaret J. Wheatley Quotes

We don't live in the world of reality, we live in the world of how we perceive reality.

Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.

Reality is mind-made.

People make their own reality. That was what Praxis had taught him years ago. A hundred people can witness the exact same event, and give two hundred and three different accountings of it.

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

Reality is not so much what happens to us; rather, it is how we think about those events that create the reality we experience. In a very real sense, this means that we each create the reality in which we live.

All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because we're liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.

You live in the image you have of the world. Every one of us lives in a different world, with different space and different time.

I'm not interested in observed reality.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

The world you perceive is a drastically simplified model of the real world.

The prism through which you experience life is so unique. There is no objective experience.

You create your response to reality, and that response, for all practical purposes, is your reality.

What you think is real is your reality.

One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.

You see persons and things not as they are but as you are.

It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

Our personal dispositions are as windowpanes through which we see the world either as rosy or dull. The way we color the glasses we wear is the way the world seems to us.

We forget that the world is what we imagine it to be. We stop being the sun and become, instead, the pool of water reflecting it.

You're only infallible about your own nervous system. You know what's going on in your own nervous system, whatever realities you're creating out of the infinite flux of being. You don't know anything about anybody else's reality unless they tell you about it. You gotta listen very sympathetically in order to understand them. So it's a limited infallibility.

What people are perceiving will dictate what their life and ultimately what your interaction is.

I'm trying to get more into other things, where reality is nothing but each individual's way of thinking.

Your perception of the world is ... really a fabrication of your model of the world. You don't really see light or sound. You perceive it because your model says this is how the world is, and those patterns invoke the model. It's hard to believe, but it really is true.