Quotes About Perspective

Does beauty give birth to love? Or does love give birth to beauty? Did I love Chloe because she was beautiful? Or was she beautiful because I loved her?

No one properly gets, or can fully sympathize with, anyone else.

The love of flowers is a consequence of modesty and an accommodation with disappointment. Some things need to go permanently wrong before we can start to admire the stem of a rose or the petals of a bluebell.

Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less.

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find the same process of simplification or selection at work as in the imagination.

We are richer than we think, each one of us.

At the heart of the pain created by sexual rejection is our habit of interpreting it as a moral judgement, when it might more accurately be categorized as a mere accident. We can start to break free from this torture by recognizing that the evenings that don't work out are really just a minor species of bad luck. The

Our mortality does not call for panic, but for a sense of awe.

Deprivation quickly drives us into a process of appreciation.

The most courageous act in politics is to try to understand your opponent.

Applied to the news , having perspective involves an ability to compare an apparently traumatic event in the present with the experiences of humanity across the whole of its history – in order to work out what level of attention and fear it should fairly demand. With perspective in mind, we soon realize that – contrary to what the news suggests – hardly anything is totally novel, few things are truly amazing and very little is absolutely terrible.

Shortly after her older brother died, Chloe (who had just celebrated her eighth birthday) went through a deeply philosophical stage. I began to question everything, she told me, I had to figure out what death was, that's enough to turn anyone into a philosopher. Chloe would put her hand over her eyes and tell the family her brother was still alive because she could see him in her mind just as well as she could see them.

There is valour in being able to identify a forgiving, hopeful perspective on one's life, in knowing how to be a friend to oneself, because one has a responsibility to others to endure.

A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.

We might define art as anything which pushes our thoughts in important yet neglected directions.

Un paradox al c?rÈ›ilor scrise de alÈ›i oameni este c? ele ne spun adesea mai multe despre propria noastr? via?? decât am fost în stare s? înÈ›elegem singuri.

My dear friend, I may be dense,' replied Humblot after having taken a brief and clearly bewildering glance at the opening of the novel, 'but I fail to see why a chap needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep.

With perspective in mind, we soon realize that – contrary to what the news suggests – hardly anything is totally novel, few things are truly amazing and very little is absolutely terrible.

Obiectivele noastre hot?r?sc ce anume interpret?m drept triumf ?i ce trebuie socotit e?ec.

cynics are merely idealists with unusually high standards. Through

Most of what makes a book good is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

Does beuty give birth to love? Or does love give birth to beauty? Did I love Chloe because she was beautiful? Or was she beautiful because I loved her?

One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.

The love of flowers is a consequence of modesty and an accommodation with disappointment...Held up against certain ideals of success, his life has been a deep disappointment. But he can also see that it is, in the end, no great achievement simply to fixate on the failure. There is valour in being able to identify a forgiving, hopeful perspective on one's life, in knowing how to be a friend to oneself, because one has a responsibility to others to endure.