We Create Our Own Problems Quotes & Sayings

No one wants to be poor. In my view, and the view of many authors who have focused on poverty and practical solutions to it, we need to move beyond the industrial-era paradigm of giving them fish, or even the information-era paradigm of teaching them how to fish, and instead move closer to the cosmic paradigm of giving them the tools with which to create their own ingenious means of addressing their problems in their cultural context and their time, while drawing
at their convenience, not ours
on our dispersed knowledge. — Robert David Steele

Acceptance does not mean inaction. We may need to respond, strongly at times ... From a peaceful center we can respond instead of react. Unconscious reactions create problems. Considered responses bring peace. With a peaceful heart whatever happens can be met with wisdom ... Peace is not weak; it is unshakable. — Jack Kornfield

Everyone wants to be happy; happiness is a right. And while on a secondary level differences exist of nationality, faith, family background, social status and so on, more important is that on a human level we are the same. None of us wants to face problems, and yet we create them by stressing our differences. If we see each other just as fellow human beings, there'll be no basis for fighting or conflict between us. — Dalai Lama

Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems. — Scott Adams

A controlling God, who is usually represented by a controlling church leadership, is just not good news. How can church leadership create freedom and not more rules? How can we bring out the best in human beings and keep it at the surface even as we deal with their problems and shortcomings? Can we empower others and release them to live from their best natures and from the truest reasons they are alive? Will we as Christian leaders, parents, and employers take on the responsibility to learn how to draw out the dreams and destiny in the people we lead? — Danny Silk

Careless of waste, wallowing in refuse, exterminating the enemies ... despising age, denying human natural history, fabricating pseudotraditions, swamped in the repeated personal crises of the aging preadolescent; all are familiar images of American society. They are signs of private nightmares of incoherence and disorder in broken climaxes where technologies in pursuit of mastery create ever-worsening problems - private nightmares expanded to a social level. — Paul Shepard

Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face today.
(Interview, Sierra Magazine, May/June 2005) — Jared Diamond

Most people bestow tremendous power onto those human beings we consider evil, who cause of threaten harm to others, even though we know they are acting from their own pain or fear. Would ignoring evil disarm it? Don't dismiss the idea. As we have declared War on Terror, a War on Drugs, a War on Poverty, a War on Crime, the problems only seem to have gotten bigger. We cling tthe notion of evil as detrimental, unpredictable force in our world and refuse any suggestion that it is not real. We argue for our fear about terrorism or climate change or economic instability, heatedly trying to prove that things are only getting worse. And in doing so, we reinforce the principle that what we focus on grows. We create our experience by where we place our attention. What we resist, persists. — Ellen Debenport

I got a lot of problems, but I'm really good at intuiting what I need to do to be happy with whatever I create. I know when to stop myself, I know when to start, I know when to leave something alone. I guess I just kind of indulge that completely, and so I just take my time. — Fiona Apple

Trying to create a sense of common interest does involve getting people actually to work together on common problems. It can't be created by law, that's why I disagree with the liberal approach becuase it's essentially a lawyer's approach. — Denis Healey

Create answers where there are questions.
Create solutions where there are problems.
Create advantages where there are obstacles.
Create opportunities where there are roadblocks. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Feelings, by themselves, do not create problems. It is rather the tendency to interpret and analyze them. When out of habit you believe those interpretations, it is there that the suffering begins. — Mooji

Marriage doesn't create problems. It reveals them. You bring unresolved stuff into it. — Rick Warren

Freight mobility and movement, while not a sexy policy issue, is a highly important one. Capacity constraints and congestion on our nation's freight rail system create many problems. — Bill Lipinski

We don't need to identify concrete solutions to all our problems. We don't need to create the illusion of control amid uncertain circumstances. We need to accept that our biggest problem is fighting the way things are, and then consciously choose to stop battling ourselves. We have to choose to be in this moment instead of scheming toward something better. This moment is a new opportunity to let go of everything that's stressing us. This moment is a new chance to take a deep breath so that we don't feel so overwhelmed. This moment is a tiny lifetime, all in itself, and we have the choice to live it. — Lori Deschene

It's not the people in the South who create racial problems - it's the people who are governing. — Nat King Cole

We create a lot of unnecessary problems in our lives by acting emotionally ... without contemplating the ripple effects of our actions. — Timothy Pina

Everyone just talks about the problems our teenage girls are facing and what they're dealing with. But there was, to me, a void in how they were being served or helped. I thought, 'Wow, I'd love to create something.' — Elizabeth Berkley

Politicians take something out of context to create problems. — Anurag Kashyap

All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create. — Paul Valery

Every day in the news we're hearing how rampant violence is in our communities, both here in America and around the world. I believe that the establishement of a United States Department of Peace can greatly help alleviate the many problems that we hear about on a daily basis. Our children deserve so much better. It is our job right here and now to build a better world. By establishing a US Department of Peace we are doing just that. Please get involved ... It's up to us to be the change that we wish for and the time is now to co-create it. — Paula Abdul

We can always create enough of our own local money to handle all the trades and exchanges we wish to make. While national currency basically drives, and is driven by profit, local money supports people with other values: people who believe in local diversity, mutual help, treating people as assets instead of problems, valuing all types of work, creating strong social networks and protecting the environment. It is these people, their values and commitment that make local money systems work. — John Rogers

There are two kinds of difficulties. Some are clearly problems to solve, situations that call for compassionate action and direct response. Many more are problems we create for ourselves by struggling to make life different than it is or by becoming so caught up in our own point of view that we lose sight of a larger, wiser perspective. Usually — Jack Kornfield

You are more than the choices that you've made,
You are more than the sum of your past mistakes,
You are more than the problems you create,
You've been remade. — Tenth Avenue North

There is a whole school of thought that holds bureaucracy tends to expand according to a kind of perverse but inescapable inner logic. The argument runs as follows: if you create a bureaucratic structure to deal with some problem, that structure will invariably end up creating other problems that seem as if they, too, can only be solved by bureaucratic means. In universities, this is sometimes informally referred to as the "creating committees to deal with the problem of too many committees" problem. — David Graeber

Technology will definitely solve all our problems, but in the process it will create brand new ones. But that's O.K. because the most you can expect from life is to get to solve better and better problems. — Scott Adams

Let me just say that to imagine racism does not exist is imagination. And to imagine that it does not create its own set of problems is true imagination. So let's not imagine that racism is gone, extinguished, because it's not. We are seeing this in the top levels of the political arena, and we are seeing it very, very plainly. — Phylicia Rashad

For men to focus on controlling women's reproduction to solve a society's problems seems nothing short of mad or, at best, superstitious. But men's superstition or insanity has real and dire consequences for the women who are its object. And states, too, home in on women's bodies, perhaps to create the illusion that men are in control of uncontrollable forces. Indeed, almost all governments try to control women's bodies and regulate their appearance in some way. — Marilyn French

It is problems that we faced for 30 years and we had to solve them in a couple of years only and the solution really pushed us and the economy couldn't handle it. We had the greatest depression. It wasn't easy and I think we expected the results. But the other thing is we have to try to create the plan B and get us out of this crisis as soon as possible. — Eva Kaili

The leader's commandment is made up of pledges to solve local and global problems, and not to create more problems to add to the existing ones. — Israelmore Ayivor

The simple fact is that we live in a world of conflict and opposites because we live in a world of boundaries. Since every boundary line is also a battle line, here is the human predicament: the firmer one's boundaries, the more entrenched are one's battles. The more I hold onto pleasure, the more I necessarily fear pain. The more I pursue goodness, the more I am obsessed with evil. The more I seek success, the more I must dread failure. The harder I cling to life, the more terrifying death becomes. The more I value anything, the more obsessed I become with its loss. Most of our problems, in other words, are problems of boundaries
and the opposites they create. — Ken Wilber

Creativity, innovation, and nontraditional ways of solving problems are feared by noncreative, uninnovative, and traditional people. It causes them apprehension and consternation. They cope with their fear by criticizing people who do things differently. If nothing can ever change, nothing can ever get any better. If you don't create new ways to solve old problems, you'll always be stuck with the old problems. — Maggie Righetti

Give people, including yourself, clear permission to make mistakes ... and to fix the problems. Since nobody's perfect, mistakes should be allowed. Cover-ups shouldn't. Cover-ups create twice the trouble. — Price Pritchett

The organizers first job is to create the issues or problems, and organizations must be based on many issues. The organizer must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act ... An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent. — Saul Alinsky

For some students, especially in the sciences, the knowledge gained in college may be directly relevant to graduate study. For almost all students, a liberal arts education works in subtle ways to create a web of knowledge that will illumine problems and enlighten judgment on innumerable occasions in later life. — Derek Bok

Twenty-five years ago, the notion was you could create a general problem-solver software that could solve problems in many different domains. That just turned out to be totally wrong. — Howard Gardner

Andrew was right. We probably wouldn't have any problems if I didn't go out of my way to create them. — Alicia Thompson

First, we must see that our negative actions arise due to prejudice and erroneous judgments. The discrimination that labels some as 'friends' and others as 'enemies' must be perceived as the root of our problems. We need to see that we label people and things in terms of our own desires, our own wishes. These wishes are transitory. The labeled objects are, themselves, impermanent. Such labeling is therefore very confused and false, yet it persists, and we continue to create suffering for ourselves. To avoid this, we need to develop equanimity for all beings suffering in samsara, tossed to and fro by their fleeting delusions, just like ourselves. — Zongtrul Losang Tsondru

The more you think about your own self, the more self-centred you are, the more trouble even small problems can create in your mind. The stronger your sense of 'I', the narrower the scope of your thinking becomes; then even small obstacles become unbearable. On the other hand, if you concern yourself mainly with others, the broader your thinking becomes, and life's inevitable difficulties disturb you less. — Dalai Lama

Something fundamental changes when people begin to ask questions together. The questions create more of a learning conversation than the normal stale debate about problems. — Michael E. Szymanczyk