Quotes About The Stories We Tell Ourselves

#1. Psychologically, our reality derives from the stories we tell ourselves, at least the ones we believe.

Matthew D. Lieberman

#2. I think what I'm after, a lot of the time, is just honesty. What accounts for the fact that the stories we tell ourselves - the story we carry around and think of most often - are the dark ones? Maybe we have to wander around in the darkness to understand it?

Peter Orner

#3. Not only does art imitate life but life imitates art. Perhaps we not only learn about life from stories, perhaps we make our lives through the stories we tell ourselves about the things that happen to us.

Ramona Koval

#4. Nothing matters more than the stories we tell ourselves to explain the world.

Mike Carey

#5. A story is a garden you carry in your pocket. The stories we tell ourselves and each other are for pleasure and refuge. Like gardens they are small places in a large world. But, Jinhua, we must never mistake the stories we tell for truth.

Alexandra Curry

#6. The stories we tell about each other matter very much. The stories we tell ourselves about our own lives matter. And most of all, I think the way that we participate in each other's stories is of deep importance.

Jessica Jackley

#7. Imagination only fails us in the end, when the stories we tell ourselves have to stop.

Joy Williams

#8. Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves obscure our truths.

Ken Liu

#9. Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what's happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what's happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self.

Sharon Salzberg

#10. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves determine the quality of the selves we imagine we are. The stories we tell about others determine the quality of our relationships with them.

Rami M. Shapiro

#11. Stories, we all have stories. Nature does not tell stories, we do. We find ourselves in them, make ourselves in them, choose ourselves in them. If we are the stories we tell ourselves, we had better choose them well.

James Orbinski

#12. In the stories we tell ourselves, we tell ourselves.

Michael Martone

#13. In this universe, and this existence, where we live with this duality of whether we exist or not and who are we, the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that define the potentialities of our existence. We are the stories we tell ourselves.

Shekhar Kapur

#14. we become the stories we tell ourselves

Michael Cunningham

#15. Who are we but the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and believe?

Scott Turow

#16. We are defined by the stories we tell ourselves.

Tony Robbins

#17. We must risk the journey to a higher ground where there
is freedom from the gravitational pull of our stories,
the pull that comes from years of trying to prove that
the stories we tell ourselves, the ones we've made up,
are the truth.

Debbie Ford

#18. Our lives follow the stories we tell ourselves.

Gina Greenlee

#19. And the stories we tell ourselves are not the only stories.

Erica Lorraine Scheidt

#20. I find that unless we are very, very careful there can be a difference between who we are and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. I

Daniel Abraham

#21. How impossible it is to forget the stories we tell ourselves, even when the truth should super-cede them.

Stephanie Danler

#22. it's the stories we tell ourselves that cause all the problems. If you look reality straight in the eye, you end up a lot less confused.

Nell Zink

#23. What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.

Rabih Alameddine

#24. That's the rub about 'Community' - for all the high-concept cleverness, it really comes down to vulgar humanism, the dumbest kind of sentimental identification. We watch it because we like these people and we miss them when they don't show up. They become part of the stories we tell ourselves.

Rob Sheffield

#25. We think we have some kind of privileged access to our own motives and intentions. In fact we have no clear insight into what moves us to live as we do. The stories we tell ourselves are like the messages that appear on Ouija boards. If we are authors of our lives, it is only in retrospect.

John N. Gray

#26. We tell specific stories about ourselves to ourselves and we're all the heroes of our own lives. But you live through certain experiences with other people, and sometimes they have very different takes on what happened.

James Franco

#27. Symbols give us our identity, our self image, our way of explaining ourselves to ourselves and to others. Symbols in turn determine the kinds of stories we tell, and the stories we tell determine the kind of history we make and remake.

Mary Robinson

#28. I'm from the South, so I tend to tell stories. That's how we express ourselves.

Faith Prince

#29. That's all beliefs are; stories we tell ourselves to stop being afraid. Beliefs have very little to do with the truth.

Adrian Walker

#30. Stories
from the literature of our culture to descriptions of our days to the lunatic's ravings
appear to be hardwired into us. Even in sleep we tell ourselves stories through our dreams, and it's been shown that those who are prevented from doing so cease to function.

Michael Ruhlman

#31. We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves - they're the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling, accidental universe tolerable.

Ken Liu

#32. We choose perfumes for ourselves so we can tell the stories inside of us - the ones that we can't possibly put into words.

C. JoyBell C.

#33. Memories are just stories we tell ourselves about our past; and that's often why they don't match when we've shared the same experiences with someone.

John Slattery

#34. We all tell stories
to ourselves and to each other. Some of learn to tell only the most interesting bits.

Shannon Donnelly

#35. In the absence of facts ... we tell ourselves stories.

Noah Hawley

#36. The problem with the stigma around mental health is really about the stories that we tell ourselves as a society. What is normal? That's just a story that we tell ourselves.

Matthew Quick

#37. Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

Siri Hustvedt

#38. But then, we all tell ourselves stories about ourselves. The money man tells himself that by getting rich he is actually enriching others, the artist tells himself that his creations are things of deathless beauty, the soldier tells himself he is on the side of the angels.

William Landay

#39. All tales, then, are at some level a journey into the woods to find the missing part of us, to retrieve it and make ourselves whole. Storytelling is as simple - and complex - as that. That's the pattern. That's how we tell stories.

John Yorke

#40. But we all live there, I thought to myself, in the imaginary stories we tell ourselves about our lives.

Siri Hustvedt

#41. It's not that there is no such thing as truth. But we come to like and trust a certain story, not because it's necessarily the most absolutely truthful, but because it's a thing that we tell ourselves makes sense of the world, at least at this moment.

Michael Kimmelman

#42. Put simply, the link between creativity and dishonesty seems related to the ability to tell ourselves stories about how we are doing the right thing, even when we are not. The more creative we are, the more we are able to come up with good stories that help us justify our selfish interests.

Dan Ariely

#43. Stories help shape the way we see ourselves in the world. They help tell us who we can be and what we can achieve.

Nicola Yoon

#44. All stories told have been told before. We tell them to ourselves, as did all men who ever were. And all men who ever will be. The only things new are the names.

Brandon Sanderson

#45. We tell ourselves there are reasons for the things that happen, but we are just telling ourselves stories. We make them up. They don't mean anything

Nicola Yoon

#46. People fall so in love with their pain, they can't leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.

Chuck Palahniuk

#47. I think history has less of an impact on current times than the stories that we tell ourselves about that history [do].

Annie Leonard

#48. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves.

Martha C. Nussbaum

#49. African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don't care anymore. I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves - how, as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent.

Chris Abani

#50. I think the hardest stories we tell are always the ones about ourselves. And as a journalist, I was taught that I'm never supposed to put myself in the story. So I spent what, 11, 12 years of my life writing about other people so I don't have to face my own life.

Jose Antonio Vargas

#51. The future is itself a story, and predictions are stories we tell to amaze ourselves, to give hope to the desperate, to jolt the complacent.

David Remnick

#52. The most difficult part of our stories is often what we bring to them - what we make up about who we are and how we are perceived by others. Yes, maybe we lost our job or screwed up a project, but what makes that story so painful is what we tell ourselves about our own self-worth and value.

Brene Brown

#53. We tell ourselves zombie stories to remind us we shouldn't live beyond the natural boundaries of life - or seek a third stage of life in this world.

Stephen Graham Jones

#54. These are the stories that we tell ourselves and only ourselves, and they are better left unshared.

Jim Crace

#55. If we are to use our tools in the service of fitting in on Earth, our basic relationship to nature
even the story we tell ourselves about who we are in the universe
has to change.

Janine Benyus

#56. We're all just in the muck trying to believe we're capable of greatness, but closer to breaking than we want to admit. And we tell ourselves stories
about ourselves,but maybe also all these stories about other people, about characters
as a way to hide from how small we are.

Doug Dorst

#57. The biggest battle in life is to change the negative stories we tell ourselves

Melanie Greenberg

#58. I started wondering about life stories, how each one of us has one that isn't apparent at first glance, what we tell the world about ourselves and what we deliberately tuck away and never reveal.

Laura Wiess

#59. We are the stories we tell about ourselves. But when those stories are lies, we are the most surprised of all.

Brent Weeks