Quotes About Belief

Your nervous system reacts appropriately to what you think or imagine to be true.

1. All your actions, feelings, behaviors—even your abilities—are always consistent with this self-image. In short, you will "act like" the sort of person you conceive yourself to be. Not only this, but you literally cannot act otherwise, in spite of all your conscious efforts or willpower.

Positive thinking" cannot be used effectively as a patch or a crutch to the same old self-image.

your mental picture of yourself "the strongest force within you.

Lecky's method consisted of getting the subject to see that some negative concept of his was inconsistent with some other deeply held belief. Lecky believed that it was inherent in the very nature of "mind" itself that all ideas and concepts that make up the total content of "personality" must seem to be consistent with each other. If the inconsistency of a given idea is consciously recognized, it must be rejected.

List here an experience from your past that is explained by the principles given in this chapter:

Lecky found that there were two powerful "levers" for changing beliefs and concepts. There are "standard" convictions which are strongly held by nearly everyone. These are (1) the feeling or belief that one is capable of doing his share, holding up his end of the log, exerting a certain amount of independence, and (2) the belief that there is "something" inside you which should not be allowed to suffer indignities.

Just say to yourself: "I am going to imagine myself acting this way now

one that is vividly imagined. If we picture ourselves performing in a certain manner, it is nearly the same as the actual performance. Mental practice helps to make perfect.

Positive thinking" does indeed "work" when it is consistent with the individual's self-image. It literally cannot "work" when it is inconsistent with the self-image—until the self-image itself has been changed.)

In much the same way, when we set out to find a new idea, or the answer to a problem, we must assume that the answer exists already—somewhere—and set out to find it.

21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell.

I failed once in the past, so I will probably fail in the future" is neither logical nor rational. To conclude "I can't" in advance, without trying, and in the absence of any evidence to support the inevitability of failure, is not rational. We should be more like the man who was asked if he could play the piano. "I don't know," he said. "What do you mean you don't know?" he was asked. "I have never tried," he replied.

Get a New Mental Picture of Yourself

if you would picture the end result—see the ball going where you wanted it to go—and have the confidence to know that it was going to do what you wanted, your subconscious would take over and direct your muscles correctly.

He succeeded in replacing the negative belief with a positive belief that he had a message of extreme importance that he alone could deliver, no matter what he looked like.

Since you make them evil or good by your own thoughts about them, it is the ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.

In fact, it is literally impossible to really think positively about a particular situation as long as you hold a negative concept of your "self.

Both experimental and clinical psychology have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the human nervous system cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and an experience imagined vividly and in detail.

It is no exaggeration to say that every human being is hypnotized to some extent, either by ideas he has uncritically accepted from others, or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true.

The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.

It's not for me - religion. It seems like a redundancy for a poet.

ìIf one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.

The Holy Spirit upon my left leads my feet without ceasing into the camp of the righteous and into the tents of the free.