Quotes About Perspective

Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.

Once you realize it's a 'them or us' situation, though," Southwick said conversationally, "it's surprising how you see it all in a different light.

Il n'y a finalement que les morts qui puissent nous envier. Et encore, j'en doute.

when we challenge our assumptions about the world—or even more important, when we realize we're making an assumption that we didn't even know we were making—we may or may not change our views. But even if we don't, the exercise of challenging them should at least force us to notice our own stubbornness, which in turn should give us pause.

Plans fail, in other words, not because planners ignore common sense, but rather because they rely on their own common sense to reason about the behavior of people who are different from them.

In other words, our perceptions of who influences us may say more about social and hierarchical relations than influence per se.

Common sense, in other words, is not so much a worldview as a grab bag of logically inconsistent, often contradictory beliefs, each of which seems right at the time but carries no guarantee of being right any other time.

But rather than producing doubt, the absence of "counterfactual" versions of history tends to have the opposite effect—namely that we tend to perceive what actually happened as having been inevitable.

Isaiah Berlin argued, the kinds of descriptions that historians give of historical events wouldn't have made much sense to the people who actually participated in them.

Sandel therefore concludes that a just society is not one that seeks to adjudicate disputes between individuals from a morally neutral perspective, but one that facilitates debate about what the appropriate moral perspective ought to be. As Sandel acknowledges, this is likely to be a messy affair and always a work in progress, but he does not see any way around it.

In reality, the events that we label as outcomes are never really endpoints. Instead, they are artificially imposed milestones, just as the ending of a movie is really an artificial end to what in reality would be an ongoing story. And depending on where we choose to impose an "end" to a process, we may infer very different lessons from the outcome.

black swan event like the storming of the Bastille, in other words, the broader you have to draw the boundaries around what you consider to be the event itself.

If you live a long life and get to the end of it without ever once having felt crushingly depressed, then you probably haven't been paying attention.

Or even a really good hug! Jesus, your arms around another person, someone's arms round you, tight, so tight. Cause it's impossible to be happy all the time, to have a happy whole life, but you can be happy in bursts: with a really good hug you could be happy for...for half an hour maybe, and then that would be the best way, not to waste your time trying to get permanently happy, but just the next half-hour you are happy for, well immediately after, just fucking kill yourself.

I wouldn't say that I've had a tough life by any stretch of the imagination.

I feel cheated never being able to know what it's like to get pregnant, carry a child and breastfeed.

I mean, I don't think I'm alone when I look at the homeless person or the bum or the psychotic or the drunk or the drug addict or the criminal and see their baby pictures in my mind's eye. You don't think they were cute like every other baby?

Life stinks, but that doesn't mean you don't enjoy it.

There's a rebirth that goes on with us continuously as human beings. I don't understand, personally, how you can be bored. I can understand how you can be depressed, but I just don't understand boredom.

Everybody's the next somebody. I was the next Hank Aaron. You see what happened.

Everybody knows something, and nobody knows everything.

I asked him was he limpin' or pimpin'. He said he was pimpin'. I said that looked like a limp to me.

When you walk behind and you're not a leader, the view never changes.

Create your own happiness.