Quotes About Perspective

I once received a lesson in kids' private world of rule making from my then-four-year-old son. We had gone to a public bathroom together; we stood side by side at two urinals, and I finished a bit earlier than he did. "I wish we had finished at the same time," he said. Why? "We get more points that way.

Ooh, we're going to think subtly. We won't get suckered into simplistic answers, not like those chicken-crossing-the-road neurochemists and chicken evolutionary biologists and chicken psychoanalysts, all living in their own limited categorical buckets.

If they're told, "The drug has a 95 percent survival rate," people, including doctors, are more likely to approve it than when told, "The drug has a 5 percent death rate.

We have multiple dichotomies in our heads, and ones that seem inevitable and crucial can, under the right circumstances, have their importance evaporate in an instant.

A "neurobiological" or "genetic" or "developmental" explanation for a behavior is just shorthand, an expository convenience for temporarily approaching the whole multifactorial arc from a particular perspective.

K. Kidd et al., An Historical Perspective on 'The World-Wide Distribution of Allele Frequencies at the Human Dopamine D4 Receptor Locus,' Human Genetics, 133 (2014): 431.

If you pay lots of attention to where boundaries are, you pay less attention to complete pictures.

And you'd better bet that changes along the lines of those presented in this chapter occurred in the brains of anyone transformed by these transformations. A different world makes for a different worldview, which means a different brain. And the more tangible and real the neurobiology underlying such change seems, the easier it is to imagine that it can happen again.

The world seems almost physically wider when up to just now the right-hand side was always obscured by the proximity of someone else; and all of a sudden you stand there, astonished, in a wide semi-circle: alone.

Die Wahrheit ist eben kein Kristall, den man in die Tasche stecken kann, sondern eine unendliche Flüssigkeit, in die man hineinfällt.

The fact was that belief in them had to be there before they themselves could be there; if one did not look at the world with the world's eyes, the world already in one's own gaze, it fell apart into meaningless details that live as sadly far apart from each other as the stars in the night-sky.

Leute, die jederzeit zu sterben meinen, leben lang!

Ich trage meine Sache vor, wenn ich auch weiss, dass sie nur ein Teil der Wahrheit ist und ich würde sie ebenso vortragen, wenn ich wüsste, dass sie falsch ist, weil gewisse Irrtümer Stationen der Wahrheit sind.

Het valt niet te ontkennen dat wij in elke afzonderlijke tak van het menselijk kunnen zo veel vooruitgang boeken dat wij terecht het gevoel hebben het niet bij te kunnen houden; zou het niet mogelijk zijn dat daaruit ook het gevoel ontstaat dat wij geen vooruitgang beleven? Uiteindelijk is vooruitgang niets anders dan het resultaat van alle gezamenlijke inspanningen, en eigenlijk kun je dus al van tevoren zeggend at de werkelijke vooruitgang altijd juist dat zal zijn wat niemand wilde.

They should not be turned in upon ourselves but upwards and outwards.

Qué endeble es la concepción del mundo con que la gente se contenta...

I can speak these words and perhaps you can see these things clearly because you are using your imagination. But I cannot imagine these things because I lived them, and to remember them with the vividness I know they should have is impossible. They are lost to me.

I once assigned a graduate class Annie Dillard's The Writing Life—a book I love—and one of the students said, "It's so effing high-minded it makes me want to go to the Kmart.

Cultivate friends you disagree with, as well as those with whom you agree, because together you'll locate the soft spots in your own thinking and find common ground to build on.

People who are aware that they are making contestable assumptions are much more likely to recognize that reasonable people of goodwill can, in fact, disagree—even about matters of profound human and moral significance.

Praxeology exhibits subjectivism in that it takes actors' subjective ends as they exist in the minds of each person. By refraining from passing judgment on these ends, praxeology itself is objective.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

What you don't know don't hurt you, for it ain't real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist. I was a brass-bound Idealist in those days. If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

they always gave good reasons for the things they did, and then when they got old they lost their reasons for doing anything and sat on the bench in front of the harness shop and had words for the reasons other people had but had forgotten what the reasons were.