Quotes on Assumptions

Aurobindo, Sri	True knowledge is not attained by thinking. It is what you are; it is what you become.
Bach, Richard	Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours.
Cage, John	After an hour or so in the woods looking for mushrooms, Dad said, "Well, we can always go and buy some real ones."
Carroll, Lewis	"I can't believe that," said Alice. "Can't you?" the Queen said, in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath and shut your eyes." Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said. "One can't believe impossible things." "I dare say you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." -From Through The Looking Glass
Castaneda, Carlos	Don Juan assured me that in order to accomplish the feat of making myself miserable I had to work in a most intense fashion, and that it was absurd. I had now realized I could work just the same in making myself complete and strong. "The trick is in what one emphasizes," he said. "We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same." -From Journey To IxtIan
Dass, Hari	If a pickpocket meets a Holy Man, he will see only his pockets.
Davis, Miles	I'll play it first and tell you what it is later.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor	We do not understand that life is paradise, for it suffices only to wish to understand it, and at once paradise will appear in front of us in its beauty. -From The Brothers Karamazov
Durant, Will	It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I have not had time to remake the world.
Einstein, Albert	Whether or not you can observe a thing depends upon the theory you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.
Freehill, Maurice	Who is more foolish, the child afraid of the dark or the man afraid of the Light?
Golas, Thaddeus	Inside yourself or outside, you never have to change what you see, only the way you see it.
Jefferson, Thomas	I never saw an instance of one or two disputants convincing the other by argument.
Jourard, Sidney	We begin life with the world presenting itself to us as it is. Someone-our parents, teachers, analysts-hypnotizes us to "see" the world and construe it in the "right" way. These others label the world, attach names and give voices to the beings and events in it, so that thereafter, we cannot read the world in any other language or hear it saying other things to us. The task is to break the hypnotic spell, so that we become undeaf, unblind, and multilingual, thereby letting the world speak to us in new voices and write all its possible meaning in the new book of our existence. Be careful in your choice of hypnotists.
Kazantzakis, Nikos	I remembered one morning when I discovered a cocoon in the bark of a tree, just as the butterfly was making a hole in its case and preparing to come out. I waited a while, but it was too long appearing and I was impatient. I bent over it and breathed on it to warm it. I warmed it as quickly as I could and the miracle began to happen before my eyes, faster than life. The case opened, the butterfly started slowly crawling out, and I shall never forget my horror when I saw how its wings were folded back and crumpled; the wretched butterfly tried with its whole trembling body to unfold them. Bending over it, I tried to help it with my breath. In vain. It needed to be hatched out patiently and the unfolding of the wings needed to be a gradual process in the sun. Now it was too late. My breath had forced the butterfly to appear, all crumpled, before its time. It struggled desperately and, a few seconds later, died in the palm of my hand. That little body is, I do believe, the greatest weight I have on my conscience. For I realize today that it is a mortal sin to violate the greatest laws of nature. We should not hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should confidently obey the eternal rhythm. -From Zorba The Greek
Kehl, Richard	A Twentieth Century-Fox executive in Paris arranged for an exhibit of the fake paintings used in the movie "How To Steal A Million." He phoned Howard Newman of the New York office, who said the fakes could not be shipped because they were on tour. "What should I do?" asked the Paris man frantically. "Get some originals," said Newman. "Nobody'll I know the difference." -From Silver Departures
Kierkegaard, Soren	The majority of people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, terribly objective sometimes, but the real task is, in fact, to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.
Kubler-Ross, Elisabeth	Love has no claims. Love has no expectations. Most of us were raised to become prostitutes. We have the illusion that with good behavior, good grades, lots of awards, pretty clothes, nice smiles, we can buy love. How many ifs were you raised with! I love you if you make it through high school. I love you if you bring good grades home. Boy, would I love you if I could say my son is a doctor. You become a doctor or a lawyer, or whatever your parents never were able to become, with the illusion that they will love you more. Love can never be bought. There are people who spend their lives prostituting themselves, pleasing other people in the hope of getting love. They will shop the rest of their lives for it and they will never find it.
Leadbeater, C.W.	It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive.
Lessing, Doris	That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way. There's a pressure on us all the time to go on to something that seems new because there are new words attached to it. But I want to take words as ordinary as bread. Or life. Or death. Clichés. I want to have my nose rubbed in clichés. -From The Four-Gated City
Maltese proverb	After taking ninety-nine years to climb a stairway, the tortoise falls and says there is a curse on haste.
Merton, Thomas	God, my God, God Whom I meet in darkness, with You it is always the same thing! Always the same question that nobody knows how to answer! I have prayed to You in the daytime with thoughts and reasons, and in the nighttime You have confronted me, scattering thought and reason. I have come to You in the morning with light and with desire, and You have descended upon me, with great gentleness, with most forbearing silence, in this inexplicable night, dispersing light, defeating all desire. I have explained to You a hundred times my motives for entering the monastery and You have listened and said nothing, and I have turned away and wept with shame. Is it true that all my motives have meant nothing? Is it true that all my desires were an illusion? While I am asking questions which You do not answer, You ask me a question which is so simple that I cannot answer. I do not even understand the question. This night, and every night, it is the same question. -From The Sign Of Jonas
Mills and Sparks	According to Mills and Sparks in their book, Wokini: A Lakota Journey to Happiness and Self-Understanding, the Lakota tradition offers 8 "lies of Iktumi" (the trickster or liar figure) that can jeopardize happiness and ruin a person's life. Here are lktumi's ancient assumptions: If only 1 were rich, then I would be happy. If only 1 were famous, then I would be happy. If only 1 could find the right person to marry, then I would be happy. If only 1 had more friends, then I would be happy. If only 1 were more attractive, then I would be happy. If only 1 weren't physically handicapped in any way, then I could be happy. If only someone close to me hadn't died, then I would be happy. If only the world were a better place, then I would be happy.
Miró, Joan	If you have any notion of where you are going, you will never get anywhere.
O'Keefe, Georgia	I decided to start anew-to strip away what I had been taught, to accept as true my own thinking. This was one of the best times of my life. There was no one around to look at what I was doing, no one interested, no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own, unknown-no one to satisfy but myself. I began with charcoal and paper and decided not to use any color until it was impossible to do what I wanted to do in black and white. I believe it was June before I needed blue.
Ortega y Gasset, José	Whoever wants to see a brick must look at its pores, and must keep his eyes close to it. But whoever wants to see a cathedral cannot see it as he sees a brick. This demands a respect for distance.
Ortega y Gasset, José	So many things fail to interest us, simply because they don't find in us enough surfaces on which to live, and what we have to do is to increase the number of planes in our mind, so that a much larger number of themes can find a plane in it at the same time.
Picasso, Pablo	When I was a kid I drew like Michelangelo. It took me years to learn to draw like a kid.
Rilke, Rainer Maria	Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divination, perhaps we would then endure our sorrows with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.
Roth, Philip	What had happened? Nothing particularly original. We had a fight, our first, nothing more or less annihilating than that. What had overcharged the rhetoric and ignited the resentment was of course her role of mother's daughter rubbing against mine of father's son-our first fight hadn't even been ours. But then the battle initially rocking most marriages is usually just that-fought by surrogates for real antagonists whose conflict is never rooted in the here and now but sometimes originates so far back that all that remains of the grandparents' values are the newlyweds' ugly words. Virginal they may wish to be, but the worm in the dream is always the past, that impediment to all renewal. -From The Counterlife
Russell Bertrand (1872-1970), Philosopher and mathematician	The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.
Satie, Eric	They always told me when I was young, "Just wait, and you'll see." Now I'm old and see nothing. It's wonderful.
Satir, Virginia	We must not allow other people's limited perceptions to define us.
Sheridan, Richard B.	Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.
Simonides (C. 566-468 B.C.), Poet	Appearance overpowers even the truth.
St. Francis	Your understandings are of misunderstandings.
Tomlin, Lily	I refuse to be intimidated by reality anymore. What is reality? Nothing but a collective hunch.
Tzu, Lao	What the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.
Unknown	Never try to teach a pig how to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Wei Wu Wei	Worshipping the teapot instead of drinking the tea.
Weil, Simone	We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, "I am suffering" than to say, "This landscape is ugly."
Welsh, R.K.	The universe isn't run on the point system. And survival isn't what it's all about. Do what you're going to do; and with humor be aware that you might as well be doing the opposite.
Yiddish proverb	To a worm in horseradish, the whole world is horseradish.