Quotes About Perspective

The point is this: difficult conversations are almost never about getting the facts right. They are about conflicting perceptions, interpretations, and values.

Because good listening requires an open and honest curiosity about the other person, and a willingness and ability to keep the spotlight on them. Buried emotions draw the spotlight back to us. Instead of wondering, "How does what they are saying make sense?

Instead of being overwhelmed by the apparent uncertainty in such a problem, start to ask what things about it you do know.

Very few experts actually measure their performance over time, and they tend to summarize their memories with anecdotes. They are right sometimes and wrong sometimes, but the anecdotes they remember tend to be more flattering to them.

Marriage is like wine. It is not be properly judged until the second glass.

He is one of those wise philanthropists who, in a time of famine, would vote for nothing, but a supply of toothpicks.

Marriage is like wine. It is not properly judged until the second glass.

I look at each episode in two ways - from a design standpoint and from an entertainment standpoint - this is TV, after all. We usually succeed on at least one of the levels.

Your writing advances a particular view of the world. Pretending that it does't just confuses everybody, starting with you.

Stories in themselves are not automatically good; it has to be the right kind of story told by the right kind of person.

You have to have that rare combination of thick skin and a tender heart. Most writers get it backward and have a tender skin and a thick heart... Every critic, however ill-informed, represents a point of view which is likely not limited to just him... Sometimes you will disagree with your critic, but you can always gain from him.

There are two basic approaches to life- one in which the world is a world of scarcity, given to us by the skinflint god, and the other in which the world is a world of endless possibilities, bestowed on us by a loving Father.

One of the most important things we can learn from Scripture is how to see ourselves accurately in the story in which we find ourselves. What story is God telling, and how does it concern us?

True independence of mind exists where there can be disagreement without demonizing the one you differ with. And this cannot be done unless you let Scripture instruct you on how to distinguish things that are of first importance and things that are of much lesser importance.

It makes a difference whether Moses or Jeroboam writes the history curriculum.

We are all living along the beach in our miserable little grass huts, and a great tsunami, a huge tidal wave of joy, is heading toward us. Our task is not that of trying to get the tidal wave to come. We cannot make it come any faster, and we most certainly cannot get it to slow down. We declare that it is coming—as the children say, ready or not—and that preparation matters a great deal.

May it not be said of us that the millennium is a thousand years of peace that Christians love to fight about.

We are starting to slide when we start to judge our brother's motives by whether or not he experiences the same gut response of reactive compassion to the outrage we are assigned to deal with. But a Christian nurse in Romania who has dedicated herself to caring for abandoned orphans with birth defects may never have heard of Roe v. Wade. She doesn't need to.

Held the right way, narrow truths create the broadest of hearts

They had money - quite a bit of it, actually - but for them, money was just bullets.

Now it makes sense, for example, if the children are taking a vocabulary test of 100 words, and one of the kids misses thirteen of them, to give him an 87 percent. But we go far beyond this. A student writes an essay on a sunset, let us say, and the teacher writes 87 percent at the top of that paper. What he is saying, in effect, is that there is a mathematical metaphor operative here. The figure of 87 is to 100 what this submitted essay is . . . to what? What on earth is this supposed to mean?

The trick is to state what we know in a recognizable fashion but in a way that is slightly off, in a way that arrests us.

Your writing advances a particular view of the world. Pretending that it doesn't just confuses everybody, starting with you. RECOMMENDED

If there are weeds in my garden, I have a problem. But it does not lead me to question the existence of lettuce.