Quotes About Perspective

You can be sad recalling sad times, but if you really want to be sad, recall happy times.

In this, the late afternoon of my life, I wonder: am I casting a longer shadow or is my shadow casting a shorter me?

The older I get, the less time I want to spend with the part of the human race that didn't marry me.

Whatever you set aside to seek happiness, remember where you put it.

Lovers needn't always agree, anymore than poetry need always rhyme.

If I choose abstraction over reality, it is because I find it the lesser chaos.

It's still possible to be a cockeyed optimist these days — you just have to be a little more cockeyed.

The experience I gained at age 21 would be useful if I were ever 21 again. But I'm 71 and new at it and keep making age 71 mistakes.

If you could travel back in time to the present moment, what would you do differently?

There is a tendency to see divine intervention in things that happen in the normal course of miracles.

It can be said of optimism that while sometimes mistaken, it is never sadly mistaken.

To be happy, you must fancy that everything you have is a gift, and you the chosen, though you worked your tail off for every bit of it.

The hardest thing about reality is returning to it after an hour inside your child's mind.

We are, many of us, a planet orbiting somebody's sun, unconscious of a lonely moon, orbiting our planet.

There was never a wise saying that couldn't be made wiser by adding the words, "and vice-versa."

In comparing religious belief to science, I try to remember that science is belief also.

How do you tell an optimist that he or she has lived a happy life by mistake?

The secret to happiness is to put the burden of proof on unhappiness.

Nowadays you envy a manic-depressive. Half the time he's happy, the other half he's right.

A man sometimes wins an argument, but a woman always wins a silence.

Dare to turn life on its end, and you may find that topsy-turvy is a truer perspective than turvy-topsy.

Man is rated the highest animal, at least among all animals who returned the questionnaire.

In the realist you have the sorry sight of the five senses deprived of their imagination.

We realize we can't have everything, and so begins the mad scramble to have everything else.