Quotes About Perspective

Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much . . . the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons.

First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.

Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of.

Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast.

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

I'd far rather be happy than right any day.

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.

We are changed souls; we don't look at things the same way anymore. For there was a time when we expected the worst. But then the worst happened, did it not? And so we will never be surprised again.

The universe was infinite, and there were most likely an infinite number of universes. To sit on one tiny planet in an ocean of infinite infinities and believe you understood anything about the true nature of existence and reality was absurd.

But I begin to wonder if he also doesn't have a demented sense of humor, and thinks it's fun to throw wild shit our way.

On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?" —Thomas Babington Macaulay, Review of Southey's Colloquies on Society

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, by Hans Rosling

The road to hell is paved with good intentions," said Boyd. "So is the road to heaven," she countered. "Which road we might be on is in the eye of the beholder.

Upton Sinclair?" "Yes. The quote is something like, 'It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

if you allow yourself to rise above a short-term perspective and super-charged rhetoric, the big picture is still looking better than ever before.

So the old saying now becomes, 'the man with a thousand media outlets, each providing its own, differing spin on the news, never knows what's true.

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life." —Steve Jobs

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." —Albert Einstein