Barbara Sher Quotes

Training was one thing, reality another.

Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.

Po swirled upward from where it had been sitting, and floated over to the window. "When you go swimming and you put your head under the water," Po said, "and everything is strange and underwater-sounding, and strange and underwater-looking, you don't miss the air do you? You don't miss the above-water sounds and the above-water look. It's just different." "True." Liesl was quiet for a moment. Then she added, "But I bet you'd miss it if you were drowning. I bet you'd really miss the air then."

Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe.

Truth itself is something you live, not something you think.

I think one of the things I was most interested in finding out was how differently we approached our work. And my reality was that we didn't approach it very differently at all, which was funny.

If you want to learn to swim jump into the water. On dry land no frame of mind is ever going to help you.

One can never really give a proof of the reality of anything; reality is not something open to proof, it is something established. It is established just because proof is not enough. It is this characteristic of language, at once indispensable and inadequate, which shows the reality of the external world. Most people hardly ever realize this, because it is rare that the very same man thinks and puts his thought into action.

And I think that's important, to know how the water's gone over the dam before you start to describe it. It helps to have been over the dam yourself.

In all aspects of life... we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor.

Sometimes it's just enough for me to have the idea. I don't need to see it through to the end. When it actually happens, I'm always disappointed because it's never like what I imagined in my head. When an idea becomes a reality, then it's a job. I'd rather just think about it.

There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with.

I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creel, but my memory.

I've learned not to be surprised by what people do no more.

There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.

I talk with the authority of failure - Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again.

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.

Where there is no difference, there is only indifference.

Things never happen exactly how you think they will.

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'

Knowing it and seeing it are two different things.

The future has to be lived before it can be written about.