Stephen Covey Quotes

Your belief systems limit your reality to a sub-set of the solution space that does not contain the answer.

The paradigm helps a person identify the thought system, which is almost always false, that is behind the rationale for the continuation of excuses. It helps them really look at excuses from an objective point of view and realize that everything they've been thinking is just as likely to be not true as it is to be true.

Seeing reality for what it is is what we call discernment. The work of discernment is very hard.

I'm able to separate fiction and reality. I guess it remains to be seen if other people are.

... the stranger is not a threat but an opportunity to grow in my view of reality, to grow in my own sense of possibility

A more conscious life is one in which a man is conscious not only of what he sees, but of the prejudices with which he sees it.

When you're overwhelmed by your emotion, you listen less and you judge more. This is also the reality of the dogmatic mind.

You don't want to know the Truth, you want to know the truth as you understand it. This is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment. You think you already know the truth! You think you already understand how it is. So you agree with everything you see or hear or read that falls into the paradigm of your understanding, and reject everything which does not.

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.

The most basic activism we can have in our lives is to live consciously in a nation living in fantasies. Living consciously is living with a core of healthy self-esteem. You will face reality, you will not delude yourself.

Paradigms power perceptions, perceptions power emotions.

Paradigms power perception and perceptions power emotions. Most emotions are responses to perception - what you think is true about a given situation. If your perception is false, then your emotional response to it will be false too. So check your perceptions, and beyond that check the truthfulness of your paradigms - what you believe. Just because you believe something firmly doesn't make it true. Be willing to reexamine what you believe.

I don't want to fool people. If I wanted to do that, I would be working with virtual reality. I want to operate on the other level, the other end of the illusion spectrum. I want to create the worst possible illusions so it doesn't really fool people, but instead give people a measure of their own belief. It makes them aware of how much they need to be fooled in order to understand the world around them.

Confidence is closely linked to how well our perceptions match reality

In order to always treat others, as we would wish to be treated ourselves, we have to learn about each other. Not just relying on an op-ed piece we may have read here, or a half-remembered interview on the television program there that happens to chime with our own views.

We usually think of ourselves as sitting the driver's seat, with ultimate control over the decisions we made and the direction our life takes; but, alas, this perception has more to do with our desires-with how we want to view ourselves, than with reality.

It is the mark of the mind untrained to take its own processes as valid for all men, and its own judgments for absolute truth.

We have to face the unpleasant as well as the affirmative side of the human story, including our own story as a nation, our own stories of our peoples. We have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us from the official view of reality. Otherwise, we are squeezed empty and filled with what other people want us to think and feel and experience.

We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think in fact they do so.

When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself.

Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.

I'm releasing myself from the responsibility of claiming to know when something is good and when it isn't.

Regain your senses, call yourself back, and once again wake up. Now that you realize that only dreams were troubling you, view this 'reality' as you view your dreams.

Individuals who were submerged in reality, merely feeling their needs, emerge from reality and perceive the causes of their needs.

Be sure that you are not deceiving yourself at any time about actual conditions.