Quotes About Perspective

Each one of us, of course, the Controller meditatively continued, goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking enormous.

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. But what if these others belong to a different species and inhabit a radically alien universe? For example, how can the sane get to know what it actually feels like to be mad?

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.

One thinks one's something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe. But in fact one's merely a slight delay in the ongoing march of entropy.

The writer proposes, the readers dispose.

His gravest offence had been to accept the world in which he found himself as normal, rational and right.

Everything that happens is intrinsically like the man it happens to.

Happiness is a hard master - particularly other people's happiness.

We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look.

A felicidade nunca é graciosa. Happiness is never gracious.

An hour later, with ten more miles and the visit to the World's Biggest Drug Store safely behind us, we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as being in one's right mind.

And to think, Will Farnaby commented, to think that people complain about modern life having no meaning! Look at what life was like when it did have a meaning. A tale told by an idiot or a tale told by a Calvinist? Give me the idiot every time.

Fortunately, however, birds don't understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis'. Just imagine, he went on, preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him?

No holiday is ever anything but a disappointment.

I took my [mescaline] pill at eleven ... I spent several minutes – or was it several centuries? – not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them – or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for I was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were they) being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair.

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons—that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.

He wanted to make the children understand that all gods are homemade, and that it's we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours.

Happiness is a hard master—particularly other people's happiness.

At ordinary times, then, we are perfectly certain that men are not equal. But when, in a democratic country, we think or act politically we are no less certain that men are equal. Or at any rate—which comes to the same thing in practice—we behave as though we were certain of men's equality.

Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made phrase about them.

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.

Experience is not what happens to you its what you do with what happens to you.

Poate p?rea ciudat, dar cele mai apropiate de realitate sunt întotdeauna operele literare considerate a fi cel mai puÅ£in adev?rate. S-ar putea ca realitatea în totalitatea ei s? fie întotdeauna mult prea puÅ£in demn? de a fi înregistrat?, prea lipsit? de sens sau prea oribil? pentru a r?mâne neliteraturizat?.

In the contexts of religion and politics, words are not regarded as standing, rather inadequately, for things and events; on the contrary, things and events are regarded as particular illustrations of words.