Quotes About Perspective

Nietzsche says very clearly all the way through his career that if you want to define human nature the first thing you must say is that human beings insist on value--we see the world through value colored eyes. We do not know how to look at things neutrally, value-free. So, it's not a question of giving up all values, it's simply a question of which values.

Hegel rejects the very idea of a single world-view, and though he does indeed give us what he considers to be the "best" world-view, it is rather a meta-view, a view about the correctness of views, rather than a view as such.

Although Lenin did not directly take issue with it, his own outlook differed radically.

If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough.

On second thought, though, maybe that was what being made in the Divine Image was all about. Eighty percent of all creatures are insects and sixty percent of all insects are beetles. If God was so inordinately fond of beetles, who could fault human beings for playing with paste?

After years of being wrong, I now realize the possibility of the Christian belief or Genesis actually being true. Perhaps there was a worldwide flood.

My first love is art, and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.

correcting errors is a waste of time if the one you are correcting attributes his own beliefs to principled, unprejudiced inquiry, while attributing the beliefs of those who disagree with him to bias and ulterior motives.

Accept the fact that sometimes coincidences happen. Clouds sometimes look like horses and clocks sometimes stop for no reason. Resist the urge to find meaning and significance everywhere you look.

If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent if you believe the military, nothing is safe.

A wise man looks upon men as he does on horses; all their comparisons of title, wealth, and place, he consider but as harness.

I thought of Einstein, and his insistence that no particular point of view was more privileged than any other: in other words his 'general relativity', and its claim that the answer to the question 'What is real?" begins with the question 'Where are you standing?

Are you just a car salesman or are you a poet too?" "I've never been accused of poetry before.

Does it make me a better person to read Cicero in the original? Cicero, for god's sake? The Alan Dershowitz of the Roman Republic?

the question… as always, the question is how to look at the sun without being blinded.

We call people rats, who desert a sinking ship; but in some cases the rat has the wisdom of the situation.

There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. Its hard to live in all those kinds of times. Easy to forget that you live in all of them.

In the work environment the stakes are suddenly raised. People are no longer struggling for good grades or social approval, but for survival. Under such pressure, they reveal qualities of their characters that they normally try to conceal. They manipulate, compete, and think of themselves first. We are blindsided by this behavior and our emotions are churned up even more than before, locking us into the Naïve Perspective.

El poder es, en esencia, amoral. Una de las habilidades más importantes que deberá adquirir es la capacidad de aprender a ver circunstancias, en lugar de, simplemente, el bien o el mal.

Learning an alien culture from so deeply inside it, he could no longer accept the superiority of one particular belief or value system. To

Going deeper into their Otherness, feeling what they feel, we can discover what makes them different and learn about human nature.

Pense nos idiotas da mesma forma que em crianças ou animais domésticos - não são suficientemente importantes para afectar o sue equilíbrio mental.

Think Like a Writer

His approach in these cases was to imagine that each person, no matter how twisted, has a reason for what they've become, a logic that makes sense to them. In their own way, they are striving for fulfillment, but irrationally. By stepping back and imagining their story from the inside, Chekhov demythologized the brutes and aggressors; he cut them down to human size. They no longer elicited hatred but rather pity.