Quotes About Perspective

fellows are just naturally interested in a good piece of work and have no unnatural restrictions in looking it over. Perhaps, and may the sahibs of the Fogg forgive me for thinking it, this simple, curious outlook of healthy men is more important than some of the monuments themselves.

How influential was Paul Sachs? Because he was short, about five foot two, he hung paintings low on the wall. When American museums rose to prominence after the war, many of the directors hung their paintings lower than their counterparts in Europe. Sachs's students had simply accepted it as the norm, and the other museums followed their lead.

the task of the ethnographer is not to determine "the truth" but to reveal the multiple truths apparent in others' lives.

A book of quotations . . . can never be complete.

We can put it in its proper perspective by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.

Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes different points of view.

The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

To live for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.

Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is.

An insane delusion can't be held by a group at all. A person isn't considered insane if there are a number of people who believe the same way…. If one other person starts to believe him, or maybe two or three, then it's a religion.

You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge.

Is it hard?' Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.

To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.

If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.

The only Zen you find on tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there.

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn't mean much.

I bet you've seen the fundamentalist bumper sticker that says, "God said it! I believe it! That settles it!" It must be a typo because what the driver really means is, "I said it! God believes it! That settles it!

The answer is simple: if you cannot find meaning inherent in life right now, as you live it in this visible world, the addition of an infinite amount more of the same isn't about to somehow make it any more meaningful! Add a whole string of zeroes to a zero and watch what happens.

I do not expect that the mere fact that I was once an evangelical apologist and now see things differently should itself count as evidence that I must be right. That would be the genetic fallacy. It would be just as erroneous to think that John Rankin must be right in having embraced evangelical Christianity since he had once been an agnostic Unitarian and repudiated it for the Christian faith.

People are always asking about the good old days. I say, why don't you say the good now days?

The creator is both detached and committed, free and yet ensnared, concerned but not too much so. If motivation is too strong the person is blinded if the objective situation is too tightly structured, the person sees none of its alternative possibilities.

How many pessimists end up by desiring the things they fear, in order to prove that they are right?

No, the reason he didn't fear death was because he had accepted his place—minuscule as an atom, insignificant as a mayfly—in a mystery and a miracle beyond full comprehension.