Quotes About Perspective

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

A pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun - and neither can stop the march of events.

Premenstrual Syndrome: Just before their periods women behave the way men do all the time.

Being a mother is an attitude, not a biological relation.

I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much . . . because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting.

People can forget when times are easy that bad things sometimes just happen, or they start to believe that bad things only happen to bad people, people who somehow brought it upon themselves.

The idea of decline is no more, no less, correct than the idea of progress. History is neither progress nor decline alone. It is both. What is determinative in the historian's judgment is simply that aspect of the present he chooses to illuminate.

For architects, towns and cities are just big display cases for their work. The fact that the place matters so much more than the building is something else they don't want to know. Making good cities is the last thing on their mind. As the heroic urbanist Jane Jacobs was heard to say, "the most cunningly ignorant people I know are architects.

At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect - a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.

How can we hope, after all, to see a tree or rock or clear north sky if we do not adopt a little of their mode of life, a little of their time? ...if the time it takes to cross space is a way by which we define it, then to arrive at a view of space "in no time" is to have denied its reality...

Those who deem this either weak of me or incredible are invited to find themselves in a like situation.

I began to perceive how relative and instrumental truth could be.

Things only exist as long as you see them. And we are all of us nothing but the sum of our moods.

The Bible is not absurd for the people who wrote it; it becomes absurd when people in our day insist on taking it literally. The Bible does not present us with material that is ridiculous in the context from which it came. The Bible springs from the context in which people then were thinking, searching, and trying to find answers .

Retirement? You're talking about death, right?

I've been in this business long enough to have acclaim and disclaim, and to know the acclaim means no more than the disclaim.

I am not an expert. That is someone else's job. If I were expert, the approach would be all wrong. It would be from the inside. I am a blunderer. I usually don't know what I am going into at the start. I go into the fog and trust something will be there.

We make too much of the good and too much of the bad.

Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.

One man's religion is another man's belly laugh.

Whether your beliefs are true or totally insane, if you accept them, then that's what your life will be about.

All our experiences have led us to believe certain things about ourselves. Whether these beliefs are true or not really doesn't matter because if we accept them as true, then they are true for us.

Our consciousness, our ideas, our frame of reference and our belief system determine whether we go to the river of life with a teaspoon, a cup, a bucket or a barrel.

Consciously or unconsciously, you always get what you expect.