Quotes About Perspective

If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience.

If you tell people you talk to God, they'll think you're religious, but if you say God talks to you, it's ten to one they'll think you're crazy.

Speed and efficiency do not always increase the quality of life.

Many an optimist has become rich by buying out a pessimist.

With their backs to the sunrise they worship the night.

My dog," he said, "just barks and plays -has all he wants to eat. He never works- has no trouble about business. In a little while he dies, and that is all. I work with all my strength. I have no time to play. I have trouble every day. In a little while I will die, and then I go to hell. I wish that I had been a dog.

No one can control his own opinion or his own belief. My belief was forced upon me by my surroundings. I am the product of all circumstances that have in any way touched me.

If you say to a man: "Eighteen hundred years ago the dead were raised," he will reply: "Yes, I know that." And if you say: "A hundred thousand years from now all the dead will be raised," he will probably reply: "I presume so." But if you tell him: "I saw a dead man raised to-day," he will ask, "From what madhouse have you escaped?

Life is not the same to all—to some a blessing, to some a curse, to some not much in any way.

All this is true, and if it were all, how beautiful, how touching, how glorious it would be. But it is not all. There is another side.

Everything in nature tells a different story to all eyes that see and to all ears that hear.

After all, death is not so terrible as joyless life.

You could find beauty nearly anywhere if you stopped to look for it, but the battle to get through the days made it easy to forget that this totally cost-free luxury existed.

Like most writers, I tend to find out what I feel on a subject by writing about it. It is how we interpret the world, how we make sense of it.

Other people his age had houses and washing machines, cars and television sets, furniture and gardens and mountain bikes and lawnmowers: he had four boxes of crap, and a set of matchless memories.

It's an illness," she said, although she made the words sound like "it's uh nillness." Nillness, thought Strike, for a second distracted. Sometimes illness turned slowly to nillness, as was happening to Bristow's mother... sometimes nillness rose to meet you out of nowhere, like a concrete road slamming your skull apart.

Strike had never wanted children; it was one of the things on which he and Charlotte had always agreed, and it had been one of the reasons other relationships over the years had foundered. Lucy deplored his attitude, and the reasons he gave for it; she was always miffed when he stated life aims that differed from hers, as though he were attacking her decisions and choices.

You could find beauty nearly anywhere if you stopped to look for it,

Lucky" was what people who couldn't bear to contemplate horrors needed to hear maimed and terrorized survivors call themselves.

Strike looked down at his own plate: where there should have been chips, there was only salad.

Perhaps she had received diamonds, Strike thought; she had always said she didn't care for such things, but when they argued the glitter of all he could not give her had sometimes been flung back hard in his face...

I think marriage is nearly always an unfathomable entity, even to the people inside it.

But as I'm not going around killing people I don't like, I don't think there's much wrong with admitting some people contribute more to the world than others.' 'So you don't subscribe to "any man's death diminishes me"?' said Robin. 'I wouldn't feel remotely diminished by the deaths of some of the bastards I've met.

Matthew would not like this, she had said. He would have liked it even less had he know how much Strike had liked it.