Quotes About Perspective

Thank Goodness I have walked in circles long enough to wear the soles of my shoes so thin that the diamonds on which I stand can now get my attention

Wheeler, P., and H. E. Rives. Dome of Many-Coloured Glass. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955.

Some in the outside world might call our traumas trivial. Were you gang-raped? Sold into slavery? Imprisoned in a concentration camp? Did you accidentally tweet a naked picture of yourself to twenty million strangers? No? Then stop whining! They would not understand that it is possible to be annihilated by a smirk, a scowl, an empty threat.

When you are young and healthy, it never occurs to you that in a single second your whole life could change.

Just because you're miserable doesn't mean you can't enjoy your life.

worshiping heroism, as typically defined, works against the idea that the lives of more common people count and hold lessons for us as well.

Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one's affections.

In popular language, middle-class children can be said to have been "born on third base but believe they hit a triple.

Nancy thought Bean was a pain and a pest. Bean thought Nancy was a booger-head.

Bean looked up into the sky. What if someone was watching her through a giant magnifying glass and thinking the same thing she was? What if she was as small as an ant compared to that someone? And what if that someone was an ant compared to the next world after that? Wow. Bean waved at the sky. Hi out there, she thought.

Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.

This world is full of forms that are illusory, and the values are all wrong, the proportions are out of focus. The things which a man of the world thinks valuable, a spiritual man must cast aside as worthless.

You always look at the things of the spirit with the eyes of the flesh. What you ought to do is to look at the things of the flesh with the eyes of the spirit.

If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.

An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Inuit earnestly, "did you tell me?"

People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.

frame: the smarter you are, the better you are at constructing a narrative that supports your beliefs, rationalizing and framing the data to fit your argument or point of view.

We behave according to what we bring to the occasion." Our beliefs affect how we process all new things, "whether the 'thing' is a football game, a presidential candidate, Communism, or spinach.

Forcing ourselves to express how sure we are of our beliefs brings to plain sight the probabilistic nature of those beliefs, that what we believe is almost never 100% or 0% accurate but, rather, somewhere in between.

There are many reasons why wrapping our arms around uncertainty and giving it a big hug will help us become better decision-makers. Here are two of them. First, "I'm not sure" is simply a more accurate representation of the world. Second, and related, when we accept that we can't be sure, we are less likely to fall into the trap of black-and-white thinking.

Why might my belief not be true? What other evidence might be out there bearing on my belief? Are there similar areas I can look toward to gauge whether similar beliefs to mine are true? What sources of information could I have missed or minimized on the way to reaching my belief? What are the reasons someone else could have a different belief, what's their support, and why might they be right instead of me? What other perspectives are there as to why things turned out the way they did?

what you value and what someone else values will be different. And your goals and values will inform your preferences for various outcomes. That means that how much you prefer a particular outcome relative to other possibilities will naturally be different from another person's preference for the same outcome relative to other possibilities.

If you're like most people, you were pretty surprised by these results. Most of us aren't aware of the wide range of what these words mean to different people. We assume that when we use a term, other people use it in the same way we do and mean the same thing we do.