A favorite theme in modern psychology, the idea of projection goes at least as far back as the first philosophers and as written in the Babylonia Talmud, “Don’t criticize your neighbors for the faults you yourself have.” Because the blame-shifting of projection is so common and frequent in everyday life, it offers one of the shortest paths to self-knowledge: we can just listen to our critiques of others, feel what irritates us the most, and use it as mirror to realize who we really are beneath all the self-deception
“The wise never harbor hostility… the virtuous man only sees the virtue in everyone else.”
“Ah how shameless – the way these mortals blame the gods.”
“Every man carries two bags about him, one in front and one behind, and both are full of faults. The bag in front contains his neighbors' faults, the one behind his own. Hence it is that men do not see their own faults, but never fail to see those of others.”
“A good man, before he can help a bad man, finds in himself the matter with the bad man.”
“Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair... if oxen and horses had hands and could paint, they would paint the forms of gods like horses and oxen.”
“I have not yet seen one who could perceive his faults, and inwardly accuse himself.”
“Projection can be as simple for the sage commander as confirming the projections that others present... Since the sage commander does not hold to a fixed position, the projection does not capture him and is not a threat.”
“Whoever criticizes others must have something to replace them. Criticism without suggestion is like trying to stop flood with flood and put out fire with fire. It will surely be without worth.”
“When people laughed at him because he walked backward beneath the portico, he said to them: ‘Aren't you ashamed, you who walk backward along the whole path of existence, and blame me for walking backward along the path of the promenade?’”
“If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, "He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone."”
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
“Where would I find enough leather to cover the entire surface of the earth? But with leather soles beneath my feet, it’s as if the whole world has been covered.”
“We deserve what we get. We bring it on ourselves… it isn’t going to be different anywhere else because we take ourselves with us.”
“Whosoever complains of the bad character of another man has revealed the badness of his own character.”
“No one is to be called an enemy, all are your benefactors, and no one does you harm. You have no enemy except yourselves.”
“People Are Always Wrong About: hating to be fooled by others while liking to be fooled by oneself.”
“People Are Always Wrong About: Discriminating others' right and wrong while not acting properly oneself.”
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.”
“those who walk in the beaten path always throw stones at those who would show them a new way”
“After building a shed at the end of my garden, I heard an ant and a mole arguing. The mole said, 'What a fine structure, it must have been a very powerful mole who built this.' The ant replied, 'You must be joking. This builder is obviously an an ant of mighty genius.'”
“The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves.”
“The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves; and can readily discover some nice difference in age, character, or station, to justify the partial distinction.”
“If you really want to understand this tragedy, look deep inside rather than helplessly bemoan your cruel fate.”
“The ordinary man places his life's happiness in things external to him—in property, rank, wife and children, friends, society, and the like... his center of gravity is not in himself and when he loses any of these external things, the foundation of his happiness is destroyed.”
“in the blessings as well as in the ills of life, less depends upon what befalls us than upon the way in which it is met, upon the kind and degree of our general susceptibility.”
“Throughout the world, the more wrong a man does, the more indignant is he at wrong done to him.”
“Instead of saying that Man is the creature of Circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that Man is the architect of Circumstance. From the same materials one man builds palaces, another hovels, one warehouses, another villas.”
“All that most maddens and torments… all the subtle demons of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified... in Moby Dick.”
“... a man may be puffed and belauded, envied, ridiculed, counted upon as a tool and fallen in love with, or at least selected as a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown—known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbors' false suppositions.”
“Everyone thinks about changing the world, but few think about changing themselves.”
“When we remember that some of the best and noblest men that ever lived have been reviled, indicted, and executed by so-called good men, how can we believe stories that revile and discredit anyone?”
“Because there is safety in derision
I talked about an apparition”
“It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.”
“To the bad habit of talking about oneself and one's faults must be added the related habit of criticizing the same faults in others. This is only a hidden manner of talking about oneself which combines the pleasure of absolution with that of confession.”
“We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to hate when we suffer. It is so depressing to think that we suffer because we are fools.”
“We are most likely to get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves are not quite certain of our own position, and are inwardly tempted to take the other side.”
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
“Projection of our own shadow makes the whole world a replica of our own unknown face.”
“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.”
“One of the worst illusions we have is thinking that negative emotions are produced by circumstances. All negative emotions come from within us, not from an external source.”
“If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare me a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.”
“I was wrong in my attempt to divine the future crone behind the young girl's face; rather, I should re-create and resurrect in the face of the crone the freshness and youth of the girl who no longer existed.”
“Our democratic dogma has leveled not only all voters but all leaders; we delight to show that living geniuses are only mediocrities, and that dead ones are myths... Since it is contrary to good manners to exalt ourselves, we achieve the same result by slyly indicating how inferior are the great”
“Nature is cruel, therefore we, too, may be cruel…. I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin!”
“If life becomes hard to bear, we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change—a change in our own attitude—hardly even occurs to us”
“It sucks that we can’t have it all
It sucks nothing is perfect
Then again, it sucks that’s the excuse we use to be unhappy.”
“Of all human vices, the greatest is ingratitude, and we must conclude that the world looks sick because the soul looking on it is sick.”
“When the Greeks identified the planets with certain gods, they projected into the sky qualities of their own psychic experience, symbolized in the images of their gods. This was a genuine procedure, derived from an inner reality. But if we imitate this symbolism, while knowing that, for instance, Venus is a hell of boiling mud and poisonous gases... it is ridiculous to associate it with qualities of love.”
“There appears to be an innate human tendency to underestimate the capacity of those who do not belong to ‘our’ group. Those who do not share our background cannot have our ability. Foreigners, people who are in a different economic status, and the young seem invariably to be regarded as intellectually backward”
“We create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads, but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in.”
“It is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it.”
“It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral”
“The past is but a present memory or condition, the future a present projection, and the present itself vanishes before it can be grasped.”
“It's only terrorism if they do it to us. When we do much worse to them, it's not terrorism.”
“You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.”
“One of humanity’s most persistent and damaging illusions is that happiness and suffering are caused by external factors.”
“Just because you notice other people's confusion, doesn't mean you aren't confused yourself.”
“If we were to make a list of people we don't like... we would find a lot about those aspects of ourselves that we can't face.”
“Ever notice that anyone going slower than you is an idiot, but anyone going faster is a maniac?”
“We look at national or international things so much in terms of our own projections that we lose track of the actual political situation.”
“Ape instinct creates projections because the projector has definite ideas and the projections ‘prove’ that the projector is real creating the most gigantic syndicate of hypocrisy that could ever be thought of.”
“the cause of suffering lies not in events or circumstance, but in the way we perceive and interpret our experience as it unfolds.”
“the more desperately we try to be good and wonderful and perfect, the more Shadow develops a definite will to be black and evil and destructive.”
“Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as those we imagine during long train journeys, as we secretly contemplate a beautiful person who is gazing out of the window – a perfect love story interrupted only when the beloved looks back into the carriage and starts up a dull conversation”
“What happens when you begin to recognize your experiences as your own projections? … from one point of view—nothing. From another point of view—everything.”
“This is the dark side of the ‘American dream.’ We blame the poor, accusing them of being poor because they do not work hard enough. Yet for the most part, the poor have less because the rich have taken more.”
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