Quotes About Perspective

Religion, for Father Pavel, involved no escape from the natural into the supernatural, no repudiation of this world for the sake of a better one whose unreality made it more malleable to our wishes. In his perspective, the natural and the supernatural were one and the same: the world became transparent, with the light of eternity shining from the other side.

While exorting us to judge other cultures in their own terms, he [Said] asks us to judge Western culture from a point of view outside---to set it against alternatives, and to judge it adversely, as ethnocentric and even racist.

It is one mark of rational beings that they do not live only - or even at all - in the present. They have the freedom to despise the world that surrounds them and to live in another way.

A change of taste is not a 'change of mind', in the way that a change of belief or even of moral posture is a change of mind.

Life is ambiguous; there are many right answers — all depending on what you are looking for. But if you think there's only one right answer, then you'll stop looking as soon as you find one.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who divide everything into two groups, and those who don't.

That's because people find what they're looking for. If we look for beauty, we'll find beauty. If we look for conspiracies, we'll find conspiracies. It's all a matter of setting our mental channel.

Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal—the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?

How can you treat death so lightly? she asks. Because it happens, he replies. It is inevitable. I do not mourn the falling of a leaf or the breaking of a wave. I do not sorrow for a shooting star as it burns itself up in the atmosphere. Why should I?

You are one of the few successful persons I know. Me? Why? You know precisely what you are doing and you do it well. But I don't really do much of anything. And of course the quantity means nothing to you, nor the weight others place upon your actions. In my eyes, that makes you a success. By not giving a damn? But I do, you know. Of course you do, of course you do! But it is a matter of style, an awareness of choice—

I have always found that hell is other people.

I was not always that way, but perhaps the shadow Earth, where I spent so many years, mellowed me a bit, and maybe my hitch in the dungeons of Amber reminded me somewhat of the quality of human suffering. I do not know. I only know that I could not pass by the hurt I saw on the form of someone much like someone who had once been a friend.

So I simply said one of the great trite truths: There is generally more than one side to a story.

Only a fool believes that life has but one meaning.

If they come upon one who still has not seen it and they speak to him of fire, he does not know what they mean. So they, in turn, fall back upon telling him what fire is like. As they do so, they know from their own experience that what they are telling him is not the truth, but only a part of it. They know that this man will never know reality from their words, though all the words in the world are theirs to use.

The thing had been quite unpremeditated on my part. I had not even thought of her as a woman until she came into my arms and revised my thinking on the subject.

Far below, the ocean was a bluegray rug being pulled out from beneath us.

Really. It can't be as bad as all that," she said. "Bad? Good and evil are always mixed up. It provides order.

I believe everything I say, though I know I'm a liar.

What's truth, anyway? Truth is what you make it.

No two authors can render the same story in the same fashion.

things sort of equal to equal things sort of being equal to each other, it didn't much seem to matter.

Few people can say of themselves that they are free of the belief that this world which they see around them is in reality the work of their own imagination. Are we pleased with it, proud of it, then?

The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three.