James W. Newman Quotes

“Anyone who is sincerely interested in personal growth, success, or increased effectiveness will find that proper care of the physical system is an absolutely essential ingredient in the recipe.”

“Dreams are not just a way of passing the time while you are asleep. They are thought to perform a very important psychotherapeutic function — like having your own built-in therapist, working while you are asleep with creative psychodrama to help you cope with the conflicts in your life.

Dreams seem to be symbolically related to the upheavals which are happening in your day-to-day world, and if you are deprived of dreams, the deprivation will eventually result in neurotic or even psychotic behavior.”

“Fear is not the only limiting emotional pattern. Have you ever been so angry that you could hardly function?”

“Have you listened to a voice on the radio day after day? A newscaster or disc jockey while you rode to work each morning, perhaps. As you heard that voice, you imagined a face to go with it. That is part of the association process.

As the days went by, your image became more vivid, more real. Then you saw his photograph in the newspaper. Did you find yourself thinking that the newspaper made a mistake? "That's not what he looks like at all!"

Your imagination did the distorting, not the newspaper.”

“Human behavior tends to be consistent with the individual's currently dominant reality structure.”

“If you just let the inevitable process of change happen in its 'own way', take your chances with it, the end result may turn out very well — or it could be disastrous.

But it is not necessary to drift along like a feather in the breeze and hope that everything will turn out all right, that you will be 'lucky'. You are not 'stuck with' the conditioning and habits of your past, nor do you need to allow others to determine your future. 'They' are not in charge of your future!

One of the most limiting attitudes a person can possibly have is, 'Well, that's just the way I am.'”

“Most of the activities which you do extremely well are activities or skills which you have automated.”

“Negative emotions are the braking mechanisms.”

“No one else can develop an attitude within your system. Only you can do that.”

“The body that you now have, whatever its age and condition, is a marvelous mechanism. An important aspect of your potential is the physical equipment which you have at your disposal, and a vital part of your personal effectiveness — the degree to which you use your potential — is the way that you care for and condition that body of yours so that it will serve you well.”

“The filtering mechanism allows only that information which is 'important' to you to pass through to a conscious, aware level. The degree to which you are aware is directly proportional to die degree of importance you assign to the input in your value system, based upon your prior experience and thought/feeling processes.”

“There are the three elements which make up your personal package of potential. Your talent, the information you have acquired about yourself and your world, and the built-in motivation to use the first two dimensions to grow, to become, to achieve.

Defined in this way, we can clearly see that we all have a lot of potential that is not being used.”

“There's a big difference between a wish and a goal. 'I want to' or 'I plan to', are a lot different from 'I wish I could'.

Next time you catch yourself wishing for something, see if it feels any different to rephrase your thought as a 'want to' or a goal or a plan. That simple difference in approach will open the door to some constructive action, instead of waiting for your wish to be granted.”

“Whatever is 'experienced' at the conscious level is recorded, subconsciously, as experience or 'reality'.”

“When you have automated an activity, while you are engaged in that skill, your more conscious processes are free to think about something else. When you are driving your automobile you can think about where you are going and what you are going to do when you get there.”

“While external motivation — whether based on fear or rewards — does work, releasing the inner motivation that is a vital part of all human systems works a lot better and can be depended upon to last longer.”

“Why on earth would anyone be afraid of success? That's what everyone is supposed to want, not fear! Think about that for a moment. What is there about success that can be a little frightening?

If I achieve success (however you may want to define that word) will I be able to maintain it? If I get up there will I be able to stay? If I become very successful can I handle the responsibility? I'll be making decisions which affect a lot of people. What if I make a mistake? What will other people think of me if I make a lot of money, live in a big house, belong to a country club? What if I can't handle that kind of lifestyle?”

“You can — to the degree that you choose to do so — develop new, more effective habits of thinking which will release your potential.”

“You can decide what you think.”

“You can decide where you want to go, what you want to become — and then deliberately guide the process of change in that direction.”

“You do not, and probably never will, know all that there is to know about anything. No matter how long, or how intensively, we study any subject, there is always more that can be learned. Whether it is something as large as the universe or as small as the atom, the more we learn the more we realize how little we know. Your 'reality' is incomplete.”

“Your behavior, unlike the output of a computer, is far more a result of how you feel than of what you know!”