Quotes About Perspective

There are basic differences between food and clothing. You eat food and wear clothing. Food goes in; clothing goes on. 2. Do not bite anything that will bite back. This includes the dog, other babies, electrical cords and your father when he is watching professional football on television. 3. Washing your face after a meal is not considered cruel and unusual punishment. It won't do any good to report Mommy and Daddy to the police. 4.

It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.

THOU SHALT NOT CONSIDER GRAVY AND HOLLANDAISE SAUCE A BEVERAGE.

If there is tragic limitation in life there is also possibility. What we call maturity is the ability to see the two in some kind of balance into which we can fit creatively.

To live is to engage in experience at least partly on the terms of the experience itself.

From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance. —LEO TOLSTOI

The artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art.

Cultural relativity is a pitiless weapon precisely because it sets our hero-systems up on end.

I have tried to avoid moving against and negating any point of view, no matter how personally antipathetic to me, if it seems to have in it a core of truthfulness.

man can never securely know what absolute reality is.

A man will say, of course, that he knows he will die some day, but he does not really care. He is having a good time with living, and he does not think about death and does not care to bother about it—but this is a purely intellectual, verbal admission. The affect of fear is repressed.23

Even a mole may instruct a philosopher in the art of digging.

There's no one thing that's true. It's all true.

But life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.

Let him think that I am more man than I am and I will be so.

There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

Going to another country doesn't make any difference. I've tried all that. You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There's nothing to that.

Death is like an old whore in a bar--I'll buy her a drink but I won't go upstairs with her

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

There isn't any me. I'm you. Don't make up a separate me.

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.

There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.