Projection Quotes

“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.”
― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

“You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it.”
― Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

“What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“How do you listen? Do you listen with your projections, through your projection, through your ambitions, desires, fears, anxieties, through hearing only what you want to hear, only what will be satisfactory, what will gratify, what will give comfort, what will for the moment alleviate your suffering? If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires. And is there any other form of listening? Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to what is being said but to everything – to the noise in the streets, to the chatter of birds, to the noise of the tramcar, to the restless sea, to the voice of your husband, to your wife, to your friends, to the cry of a baby? Listening has importance only when on is not projecting one’s own desires through which one listens. Can one put aside all these screens through which we listen, and really listen?”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

“Since the beginning of time, people have been trying to change the world so that they can be happy. This hasn’t ever worked, because it approaches the problem backward. What The Work gives us is a way to change the projector—mind—rather than the projected. It’s like when there’s a piece of lint on a projector’s lens. We think there’s a flaw on the screen, and we try to change this person and that person, whomever the flaw appears on next. But it’s futile to try to change the projected images. Once we realize where the lint is, we can clear the lens itself. This is the end of suffering, and the beginning of a little joy in paradise.”
― Byron Katie

“When two things occur successively we call them cause and effect if we believe one event made the other one happen. If we think one event is the response to the other, we call it a reaction. If we feel that the two incidents are not related, we call it a mere coincidence. If we think someone deserved what happened, we call it retribution or reward, depending on whether the event was negative or positive for the recipient. If we cannot find a reason for the two events' occurring simultaneously or in close proximity, we call it an accident. Therefore, how we explain coincidences depends on how we see the world. Is everything connected, so that events create resonances like ripples across a net? Or do things merely co-occur and we give meaning to these co-occurrences based on our belief system? Lieh-tzu's answer: It's all in how you think.”
― Liezi, Lieh-tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living

“We tend to take whatever’s worked in our particular set of circumstances (big family, small family, AP, Ezzo, home school, public school) and project that upon everyone else in the world as the ideal.”
― Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood

“His small compliments and offhand remarks formed a new scripture, and in breathless conversations and lonely, dream-drunk nights they built whole theologies from them.”
― Carey Wallace, The Blind Contessa's New Machine

“Don't be a reflection of your depression, your dark, or your ugly. Reflect what you want. Your light, your beauty, & your strength. Aspire for greatness - reflect who you are; not which deficits you maintain. Showcase the hidden treasures.”
― Tiffany Luard

“If you were easier on yourself, you wouldn't be so tough on everyone else.”
― Kate McGahan

“People outwardly project their innermost insecurities.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“...Personality projection is well documented. In fact, it's the second-most-common cause of so-called demonic possession. The most common being schizophrenia...”
― Stephen King

“Beware projection - in all directions.”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“I hate now for men to dote in this way, the ones who don't know me. Their praise lands uncertainly in the air somewhere between the two of us, because it doesn't belong to me. I hate to hear them tell me what I am, even or especially when what they think I am is kind or brilliant or beautiful. I hate when they insist that I have no faults, that my laziness or violence or cruelty simply don't exist.

When they speak this way I am even less in my body than usual, feeling the sickness of a stranger look me in the eye and describe what is not there. What I am feeling is their disregard for my reality. I am being made to wear whatever particular fantasy they wish to project.

Each time it happens I have to restrain myself from screaming in their faces to prove I am not what they believe me to be. In these moments I am happy with my ugliness and want them to see it. Whatever badness I am I want to be it, to be as much like whatever my self is as possible; as far from the stranger's projection as possible.”
― Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

“At every moment, anyone who dares to predict the future depends largely on the projection of present trends: but as the microbiologist Rene Dubos has said, "Trend is not destiny." Malthus wisely never put much rhetorical force into his predictions of future population size. He deserves neither positive nor negative credit in this area.

A word about prediction. Embarrassing experiences, coupled with Dubos's warning, have led demographers to state repeatedly that they do not make predictions: only projections — projections of present trends. Trends may change with little warning. After two repetitions in the daily press, what begins as a projection metamorphoses into a prediction in the minds of readers. In spite of their warnings, demographers are repeatedly castigated for making predictions that don't come true.”
― Garrett Hardin, The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia

“Most real-world villains do not really see themselves as villains, and they despise heroes generally because they do not recognize heroes. An evil man assumes that anyone willing to do the right thing is no less rotten on the inside than he, and that there is always some ulterior motive. He hates the righteous man not because he hates righteousness, but because he knows only how to project ill will.”
― Criss Jami

“Projecting the abjection that haunts us onto the Other: how do we avoid ceding to this, which nourishes our phantasms and sometimes our mass graves?… The ego-flesh would have to confront its torment, take it up in itself, instead of projecting it outside of itself: from that hole of jouissance in which the Thing pulses, from where that ancient wound was, I must come forth to myself and to my body—but I will be able to do so only if I had already been there, only if I recognized this wound as mine, and this unnamable Thing as the flesh of my flesh.”
― Jacob Rogozinski, The Ego and the Flesh: An Introduction to Egoanalysis

“Those who feel superior do not need to show it, and those who need to show they are superior, feel inferior.”
― Jack Freestone

“By standing up to our fears, examining our darkness and reassembling our fragmented selves, we undergo a
profound metamorphosis ... provided we’re up to the
challenge of seeing the world for what it is: a product of our own projections that have been manipulated for something else’s benefit.”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

“I'm living proof to not let anyone project their limitations on you.”
― Marion Bekoe

“When we hate a man, we hate in him something that lies within ourselves”
― Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something N****** believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Casting stones at the perceived irritations of others merely shatters our shadow-self mirror.”
― Stewart Stafford

“You want her to be the way you want her to be, rather than seeing her the way she is.”
― Calvin Niles, The Sun Rises in Eastmoor

“There is an emerging philosophy in the scientific community that...consciousness informs itself through its creations. In other words, the things that we design and build in the world around us, are, in fact, us - our collective consciousness - conveying messages from ourselves, about ourselves, back to ourselves”
― Gregg Braden, Pure Human: The Hidden Truth of Our Divinity, Power, and Destiny

“Sometimes, if the person’s ego is a bit stronger, he or she projects this threatening parent onto a spiritual leader or organization. The person either becomes a tyrant or lives in fear of other tyranny. We see this all the time on social media. People are continually posting items about how “evil” certain people and groups are, or they themselves are making dogmatic and righteous statements.”
― Laurence Galian, 666: Connection with Crowley

“Our body is a surface onto which other people project their inner world. They’re not really seeing us. They’re seeing themselves.”
― Donna Goddard, Consciousness Rising

“You are always creating your state of being in every moment, based on the way you are perceiving reality. Perception is creation. To perceive reality correctly (according to unity) is to create a positive, expansive state of being. To perceive reality incorrectly (according to separation) is to create a negative, contracted state of being.”
― Aaron Abke, The Three Beliefs of Ego: A Sufferer’s Guide to Freedom

“You do not see other people. You see a story you tell yourself about them.”
― Ujjwal Ganesh, The Art of De-Illusion: How to Stop Your Mind from Lying to You and See the World as It Is

“When it isn’t possible to attack what is said, they attack the one who said it.”
― Abraham Cezar