Quotes About Perspective

The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.

Life itself is too great a miracle for us to make so much fuss about potty little reversals of what we pompously assume to be the natural order.

You are certainly unique. Everyone is unique. Nobody has ever suffered quite like you before because nobody has ever been you before.

What an amusing drama life is when one is not obliged to be one of the characters!

Nobody ever reads the same book twice.

They were anxious to make men of us, by which they meant making us like themselves.

There comes a time when one must be strong with rationalists, for they can reduce anything whatever to dust, if they happen not to like the look of it, or if it threatens their deep-buried negativism. I mean of course rationalists like you, who take some little provincial world of their own as the whole of the universe and the seat of all knowledge.

Life, as he conceived of it, was a long decline from a glorious past, and if a reader approaches a newspaper in that spirit, he can find much to confirm him in his belief, particularly if he has never examined any short period of the past in day-to-day detail.

Do not suppose, however, that I intend to urge a diet of classics on anybody. I have seen such diets at work. I have known people who have actually read all, or almost all, the guaranteed Hundred Best Books. God save us from reading nothing but the best.

You and I have precisely the same amount of time as the Old Masters— twenty-four hours in every day. There is no more, and never any less.

His reply had that clarity, objectivity and reasonableness which is possible only to advisers who have completely missed the point.

All eras of history are an equal distance from eternity.

If Heloise had been more clear-headed she'd have seen that Abelard was a frightful nerd in human relationships.

they were frightened by the concept of a brain tumor; the idea that anybody could have one; even they. The

I'd never understand little kids. You ask them to clean up their toys, and it's like the end of the freaking world. You ask them to do a big kid chore that they won't be any good at, and it's like an early Christmas present.

You know what they say assuming does. It makes an ass out of you and me, but mostly just me.

The apostle Paul wrote that he'd learned to be content in whatever circumstances he was in. I used to think I was content, but now I could see that my contentment was based upon how well I controlled the circumstances of my life, not upon my trust in a loving God.

I used to think I was content, but now I could see that my contentment was based upon how well I controlled the circumstances of my life, not upon my trust in a loving God.

People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.

Yes, I am letting my own experience color my answer, which is what experience is for....

I didn't want to know that the monster that lived under your bed when you were a kid not only really is there but used to have a few beers with your dad.

Oh, why does compassion weaken us?' It doesn't, really ... Somewhere where it all balances out - don't the philosophers have a name for it, the perfect place, the place where the answers live? - if we could go there, you could see it doesn't. It only looks, a little bit, like it does, from here, like an ant at the foot of an oak tree. He doesn't have a clue that it's a tree; it's the beginning of the wall round the world, to him.

Sungold blew impatiently and began to dig a hole with one foot. She booted his elbow with her toe and he stopped, but after a moment he lowered his head and blew again, harder, and she could feel him shifting his weight, considering if she might let him dig just a small hole.

Don't let the title mislead you, Arlbeth told her. The king is simply the visible one. I'm so visible, in fact, that most of the important work has to be done by other people. Nonsense, said Tor. Arlbeth chuckled. Your loyalty does you honor, but you're in the process of becoming too visible to be effective yourself, so what do you know about it?