Quotes About Perspective

The human brain, instinctively, and unfailingly translates everything into terms of How does that affect ME? Start every appropriate sentence with you.

What ages you faster, suffering or experience?

In the distant past, Muslim doctors advised nervous people to look up at the sky. Forget the tight earth. Imagine that the sky, all of it, belonged to them alone. Crescent, low moon, more stars than the eyes looking up at them. But the sky was free, without any price, no one I knew spoke of it, no one competed for it. Instead, one by one those who could afford it began to sleep indoors in cool air-conditioned rooms, away from the mosquitoes and the flies...

Earlier in this century someone claimed that we work at our play and play at our work. Today the confusion has deepened: we worship our work, work at our play, and play in our worship.

To enjoy in tragedy that which one would not willingly suffer in reality is "miserable madness" (miserabilis insania).

Even if you are Catholic, if you live in New York you're Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you are going to be goyish even if you are Jewish.

You can understand and relate to most people better if you look at them - no matter how old or impressive they may be - as if they are children. For most of us never really grow up or mature all that much - we simply grow taller. O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.

A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.

I came to believe it not true that the coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man only one. I think it is the other way around: It is the brave who die a thousand deaths. For it is imagination, and not just conscience, which doth make cowards of us all. Those who do not know fear are not truly brave.

Hope is ambiguous, but fear is precious.

If God lived on earth," goes a sardonic Yiddish saying, "people would knock out all His windows.

Nietzsche's atheism is characterized by an element of gratitude; it is not simply a rebellion.

Poiché non conosciamo davvero la loro vita interiore - cosa provano e percepiscono - corriamo il rischio di privarle della loro dignità trattandole come se non ne avessero. Il solo fatto che noi non vorremmo mai essere al loro posto non significa che in loro non sia rimasto niente che meriti rispetto.

Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.

Tell me anyway--Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.

Truth is what people want to believe and nothing more.

Truth is only what people want to believe and nothing more.

It's clear.

I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.

The older I get, the surer I am that I'm not running the show.

Innocence has a single voice that can only say over and over again, I didn't do it. Guilt has a thousand voices, all of them lies.

Robert Frost wrote in 1914, "Why abandon a belief / Merely because it ceases to be true.

In fact, when some wedding guest inevitably complains about the seating arrangements, you might point out how long it would have taken you to consider every possibility: assuming you spent one second considering each one, it would come to more than half a million years. The unhappy guest will assume, of course, that you are being histrionic.

Believing in what you desire to be true and then seeking evidence to justify it doesn't seem to be the best approach to everyday decisions.