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"We are animals who travel the same trails in the forest every day. If that were not so, there would be no trails in the forest. We get up in the morning and proceed through the same routine every day." [Gerry Spence, Seven Simple Steps to Personal Freedom: A Handbook 37 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001)]
"[W]e each grow up to create for ourselves a predominant disposition or frame of mind. This underlies the ‘character' by which we are known, and it is within this that our more specific beliefs and skills are set." [Liam Hudson, The Psychology of Human Experience 117 (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1975)]
"Ordinarily a man sees only what he can observe from his own perspective. He understands the things of life in terms of his own relationship to them." [John S. Dunne, Time and Myth 48 (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973)]
"Our motives program our perception; our purpose organizes our world." [Arthur Deikman, Personal Freedom: On Finding Our Way to the Real World 44 (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976)]
"It is not the role of metaphor to draw our sight to what is there, but to draw our vision toward what is not there and, indeed, cannot be anywhere. Metaphor is horizonal, reminding us that it is one's vision that is limited, and not what one is viewing." [James P. Carse, Finite & Infinite Games: A Vision of Life in Play and Possibility 109 (New York: Free Press, 1986)]
"A man's life work, despite his conscious intentions, reinforces values of certain sorts and ignores others, and operates within one set of cultural myths and ignores others." [Michael Novak, The Experience of Nothingness 43 (New York: Harper Colophon, 1971)]
"We interact largely with extensions of our own egos. We stumble over the consequences of our past acts. . . . We rarely come into contact with a force which is clearly and cleanly NOT US. Every struggle is a struggle with ourselves, because there is a little piece of ourselves in everything we encounter--houses, clothes, cars, cities, machines, even our foods. . . . Our world is only a mirror, and our efforts mere shadowboxing. . . ." [Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness 18 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970)]
"One cannot do without a perspective and, whether we like it or not, we are condemned to wishes, value judgments and even a philosophy of history." [M. Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-sense 167-168 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964)(Herbert L. Dreyfus & Patricia Allen Dreyfus, trans.)]
"One is born into a moral universe, produced by the experience of all former generations. It is a mixture of natural interest, especially of the ruling classes, and wisdom, acquired by the leading people. A moral universe is not only an ideology, that is, a product of the will to gain and to preserve power. It is also a result of experience and real wisdom." [Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture 139 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959)]
"We discern situational patterns by means of the particular vocabulary of the cultural group into which we are born. Our minds, as linguistic products, are composed of concepts (verbally molded) which select certain relationships as meaningful. Other groups may select other relationships as meaningful. These relationships are not realities, they are interpretations of reality--hence different frameworks of interpretation will lead to different conclusions as to what reality is." [Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change 35 (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965)]
"We cannot obtain the categories that allow us to describe our situation and to reflect about ourselves unless we share in specific, historically conditioned traditions of discourse that none of us authored individually. Without these categories the imagination cannot work. But with them we cannot easily prevent ourselves from becoming the unwitting reproducers of a shared picture of the world. If we stray too far or too quickly from the collective script we are left without a way to converse." [Roberto Unger, Passions: An Essay on Personality 20-21 (New York: Free Press, 1984)]
