Quotes About Perspective

Not if you have the right attitudes. It's having the right attitudes that's hard.

This is the source of the trouble. Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about. But no one is willing to give up the truth as he sees it, and as far as I know, no one now living has any real reconciliation of these truths or modes. There is no point at which these visions of reality are unified. And

what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn't want that because it is all around

The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn't mean much.

What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one.

Is Euclidian geometry true or is Riemann geometry true? He answered, The question has no meaning. As well ask whether the metric system is true and the avoirdupois system is false; whether Cartesian coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false. One geometry can not be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

I think it was Coleridge who said everyone is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. People who can't stand Aristotle's endless specificity of detail are natural lovers of Plato's soaring generalities. People who can't stand the eternal lofty idealism of Plato welcome the down-to-earth facts of Aristotle.

Some things you miss because they're so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don't see because they're so huge. We were both looking at the same thing, seeing the same thing, talking about the same thing, thinking about the same thing, except he was looking, seeing, talking and thinking from a completely different dimension.

I feel happy to be here, and still a little sad to be here too. Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive.

Appena arrivata credeva in cima ai grattaceli ci stessero dei tizi che vedevano tutto quello che succedeva e non sarebbero mai scesi a parlarle. Poi aveva scoperto che non c'è nessuno che sa quello che succede.

In a sense, he said, it's the student's choice of Quality that defines him. People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because people are different in terms of experience.

These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow.

I had been seeing that shim in a kind of intellectual, rational, cerebral way in which the scientific properties of the metal were all that counted. John was going at it immediately and intuitively, grooving on it. I was going at it in terms of underlying form. He was going at it in terms of immediate appearance. I was seeing what the shim meant. He was seeing what the shim was.

we don't usually see that there's a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We don't even have a term for it, so I'll have to use the Japanese mu.

If subjectivity is eliminated as unimportant, he said, then the entire body of science must be eliminated with it.

Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about. But no one is willing to give up the truth as he sees it, and as far as I know, no one now living has any real reconciliation of these truths or modes.

This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is. Blind

If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.

But if a group of foreign students were brought in, or, say, medieval poems out of the range of class experience were brought in, then the students' ability to rank Quality would probably not correlate as well. In a sense, he said, it's the student's choice of Quality that defines him. People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because people are different in terms of experience.

The childhood capacity for empathy progresses from feeling someone's pain because you are them, to feeling for the other person, to feeling as them.

when you think categorically, you have trouble seeing how similar or different two things are. If you pay lots of attention to where boundaries are, you pay less attention to complete pictures.

As Beck and other cognitive therapists have emphasized, much of what constitutes a depression is centered around responding to one awful thing and overgeneralizing from it—cognitively distorting how the world works.

Kids learn dichotomies in the absence of any ill intent. When a kindergarten teacher says, "Good morning, boys and girls," the kids are being taught that dividing the world that way is more meaningful than saying, "Good morning, those of you who have lost a tooth and those of you who haven't yet.