Quotes About Perspective

A dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees farther of the two

A pygmy upon a gyants shoulder may see farther than the [giant] himself.

Pauli turned to the audience and argued, "Yes, my theory is crazy enough!" Then Bohr insisted, "No, your theory is not crazy enough!

With regard to both the physical and the social world, one of the main lessons of neuroscience is that our perception of reality is something we actively construct, not a passive documentation of objective events.

Yes, as distasteful as it is, it is beneficial to talk to people who disagree with us. So if you hate conspiracy theories and run into someone who believes that we faked the moonlanding and Einstein plagiarized relativity from his mailman, don't tell him, 'You life is a cruel joke' and walk away. Have tea with him. It can broaden your style of thinking, and it's cheaper than seeing a therapist.

It is dangerous to judge ability by short-term results.

Ever notice that when you lack sleep, things that seemed important before no longer seem to matter so much? Setting up and programming the coffeemaker so the coffee will be ready when I wake up the next day seems like a great idea at 9:00 p.m., but at 2:00 a.m.

Psychologists call this the confirmation bias

The confirmation bias has many unfortunate consequences in the real world.

Random events often look like nonrandom events, and in interpreting human affairs we must take care not to confuse the two.

Just as, looking at a Rorschach blot, you might see Madonna and I, a duck-billed platypus, the data we encounter in business, law, medicine, sports, the media, or your child's third-grade report card can be read in many ways. Yet interpreting the role of chance in an event is not like intepreting a Rorschach blot; there are right ways and wrong ways to do it.

As philosopher Francis Bacon put it in 1620, "the human understanding, once it has adopted an opinion, collects any instances that confirm it, and though the contrary instances may be more numerous and more weighty, it either does not notice them or else rejects them, in order that this opinion will remain unshaken."46

Our assessment of the world would be quite different if all our judgments could be insulated from expectation and based only on relevant data.

It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong. —Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, 1993

Our assessment of the world would be quite different if all our judgments could be insulated from expectation and based only on relevant data.           A

After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling…. But before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings."6

The fact that we assess information in a biased manner and are unaware we are doing so can be a real stumbling block in negotiations, even if both sides sincerely seek a fair settlement.

The "floater" misses reality; the concrete-bound person misses understanding.

So the first issue of a proper method is always set the proper context. What are you counting on? What do you already know by the time you get to this point? What are you taking for granted that enables you to study this particular topic?

Leonardo is both an extraordinary left-brained academician obsessed with portraying perspective correctly and an impish right-brained trickster who takes delight in fooling the viewer with perspectivist sleights of hand.

One's destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.

For I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand. For I believe that "Unless I believe, I shall not understand." —ANSELM OF CANTERBURY1

Everything that surrounds you can give you something.51 —Hungarian photographer André Kertész

The artist sees what others only catch a glimpse of.