Quotes About Perspective

Because I had gone through the same thing. I had tasted the darkness." "You'd 'tasted the darkness', had you?" "I'm allowed to have some poetry in my life, Valkyrie." "'Tasted the darkness, I swear to God... What, did you have a darkness sandwich, or was it a whole plate? What did you have for dessert? Was it pretentiousness? Did you have a bowl of pretentiousness for dessert?

Let's never forget that whatever brilliant ideas you have or hear, that the opposite may also be true.

The trick is learning to frame your new ideas as tweaks of old ideas, to mix a little fluency with a little disfluency—to make your audience see the familiarity behind the surprise.

Initially [my favorite books] seem to immerse me in another life, but ultimately they immerse me in me; I am looking through the window into another person's home, but it is my face that I see in the reflection.

This sell something familiar, make it surprising. To sell something surprising, make it familiar.

In order to keep a true perspective of one's importance, everyone should have a dog that will worship him and a cat that will ignore him.

Schopenhauer wrote, 'Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

1. If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now.8

It is hard to think about your past without tidying it up into a kind of story: one in which you are cast as the hero or victim. Invariably we ignore the regular dice-rolls of chance or random luck; successful high-flyers are typically prone to ignoring the interplay of blind fortune when they credit their career trajectories to their canny business sense or brute self-belief. We tell the story we want to tell, and we live out those stories every day.

You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realise how seldom they do.

What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgements about these things.'1 In other words, it is not events out there that cause our problems but rather our reactions to them: the stories we tell ourselves.

WE GENERALLY FEEL defined by our past. Our past, however, is a story that we tell ourselves in the present.

We are, each of us, a product of the stories we tell ourselves.

Let's not mince words: if we are ill, or a loved one dies, this is ultimately a matter of no importance to fate and the machinations of the universe.

Going into a game of tennis: If you go in determined to win, and then your opponent is playing better than you, you're probably going to get anxious and feel that you're failing. Whereas if you go in determined to play as well as you can, then it doesn't matter if your opponent is a bit better than you or if they start to win: you're not failing.

Hamlet: 'There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Perhaps the first mark of emotional maturity is to realise that there is an enormous gulf between the events of the world and what we do with them.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.' Later, in the nineteenth century

We mistake the horizon we see for the parameters of the world.

The appreciation of a painting or a piece of music, for example, or even falling in love, is all about our subjectivity. But to decide that the entire universe operates in such a way, let alone to go to war because we are so convinced we are right that others must agree with us or die, that surely should demand a higher level of argument than 'It's true because I really, really feel it is.

A lot is said about children having stronger psychic ability because theyre so unjaded and innocent. This excruciating view of children is generally expounded by people who think like children and perhaps can be forgiven.

When we are customarily annoyed by what we see as the failings of others, we are judging them by a ludicrous standard: we are assuming that they fully understand our desires, quite possibly better than we do, and that they have nothing to do but arrange things to fall seamlessly into place around our probably ill-communicated wishes.

A friend asked, "If increased awareness means less happiness, why bother?" No answer.

Because their supremacist perspective is unquestioned—and the supremacists would prefer it remain that way—all questioning of that supremacism by definition will be classed as speculation, and all speculation on that subject will be discouraged. Of