6 Quotes That May Change the Way You See the World

I actually keep them in the Notes section of my phone. They're THAT essential.

We are, if nothing else, a breathtaking mosaic of the battles we’ve won.

Who we are isn’t shaped by objective, consensual reality, but our interpretation of that reality. It’s the reason eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. Our biases cause us to see characteristics that aren’t there or actions that never happened. We see without looking, hear without listening, and most damning of all, are too mentally distracted to give our full attention to what’s right in front of us.

But isn’t that where art comes from? What if we did see life the same way—how excruciatingly boring that would be? Jane Austen’s books would have none of their ironic wit, Francis Bacon’s paintings none of their psychotic rage, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work none of its naïf, abstract iconography. If, heaven forfend, we saw things the same way, life would be the metaphorical equivalent of this:

Still from one of my favorite new shows, Bill Stiller dystopia Severance.

For purposes of reportage then, biases are less than ideal, but in another sense, the one where I get to see the world through different eyes, I love our slanted, tainted take on life. I want to be offended, made to see things from an opposite perspective, jarred out of my comfortable complacency. It’s why I read, why I write, and why I love to read the writings of others.

Here then are my top five personal favorite quotes. I hope they resonate with you as much as they resonate with me.

“Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.” ~ Former boxer and heavyweight title holder Mike Tyson

No, I haven’t forgotten that Tyson is a convicted rapist. Or that he’s just a gross human being. But even a broken clock is right twice a day. And here’s my quod erat demonstrandum to prove it: a friend of mine who recently had a baby.

Like all inexperienced newbies, my friend (we’ll call her Ashley) had some pretty laughable notions of what she would and wouldn’t do as a new mom. She was going to have an “all natural” birth, no spinal anesthesia, no pain killer. Her baby would never be bottle fed. She would sleep train it just like she’d crate trained her dogs. The list went on. If anybody had bothered telling her the truth (which is that “everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth”, especially when it comes to kids), she wouldn’t have believed them. Such is the grim dogmatism of new parenthood.

Sure enough, her labor didn’t proceed as hoped. She was weeks overdue, so they had to induce. The Pitocin drip sped up her Richter-scale-level contractions, which were less than a minute apart. When out of desperation she finally opted for the spinal, she cried, feeling like a failure before she’d even had a chance to hold her baby (who is fine, by the way). You see, life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans. When her milk didn’t come in properly and she ended up having to bottle feed, I reminded her of Tyson’s quote. “There’s what we think we know and what we eventually discover,” I said. “You aren’t a failure, just a human. Your boy is beautiful, and he will love you.”

Which he does.

“Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.” ~ John Donne

Ever the optimist, Donne believed our minds could, with work and discipline, be forged into citadels against the world’s chaos. In this way, his words of wisdom were an early precursor to Voltaire’s haunting advice, “Il faut cultiver notre jardin.” One must cultivate one’s own garden.

In his famous 1759 novel, Candide, Voltaire wasn’t giving gardening tips. He was suggesting we keep our distance from the world, give up our foolish conceit of changing the dysfunctional society of man. Detach from it so thoroughly, in fact, that human affairs no longer concern us. He commends us to take our small plot of land, give ourselves fully to making it beautiful and productive, or risk being driven mad, enslaved even, and never again knowing a moment’s peace.

Personally, I go back and forth on this. Spending too much time doom-scrolling the news certainly has an unhealthy effect on my emotional well-being. But can we truly afford to ignore the suffering in this world—suffering which may soon be heaped upon our heads? What if everyone had been busy “cultivating their garden” during the Holocaust? Some did, but it wasn’t long before the dark shadow of the SS fell over half the world. Need I remind anyone that John Donne also said, “No man is an island”?

“Gnaw the bone which is fallen to thy lot.” ~ European proverb

There is something just so Buddhist about this adage. In short, it means to accept the “is-ness” of each situation or hardship as it comes. One of the things I love about this piece of wisdom, surprisingly, is how antithetical it is to our American way of thinking. Capitalism, up-by-the-bootstraps, manifest destiny, rugged individualism, all of these imply that with hard work and sacrifice, we can scratch out a better life for ourselves. That’s simply isn’t true. Plenty of people work two or three jobs and can barely afford to feed their families. Would they be happier if they learned to “gnaw the bone which is fallen to [their] lot”, find what happiness they can if and where they find it, and be grateful for even that much? Probably. But your garden-variety American would probably tell that person to just get a fourth job. Happiness is always behind the next door, if you can get it to open. It’s one lottery ticket away.

I believe there are times when you have no other choice but to gnaw that winter’s bone. Railing against it—or fate, if you will—will only exhaust you, much in the same way goosing a gas pedal on a car that’s stuck in the mud will merely spin the tires. Only humans attach value judgments to reality, when in truth, reality just is. The deepest source of human misery is not wanting things to be the way they are. That extends to not wanting ourselves to be the way we are or others to be the way they are. What madness! It’s our struggle against a world that neither wants nor cares to know what our wishes are that makes us the most unhappy. We are the suns in our little heliocentric universes (this is normal and not intended unkindly), but we are the only ones who believe that.