Quotes About Perspective

Es siempre triste mirar a través de ojos nuevos las cosas en que uno ha gastado sus capacidades de adaptación.

If a man stands before a mirror and sees in it his reflection, what he sees is not a true reproduction of himself but a picture of himself when he was a younger man

What is a sheep only millions of little bits of sheepness whirling around and doing intricate convolutions inside the sheep? What else is it but that?

If a man stands before a mirror and sees in it his reflections what he sees is not a true reproduction of himself but a picture of himself when he was a younger man.

You may have come on no bicycle, he said, but that does not say that you know everything.

I looked at my hand through it and saw nothing that was recognisable. Then I looked at several other things but saw nothing that I could clearly see. MacCruiskeen took it back with a smile at my puzzled eye. It magnifies to invisibility, he explained. It makes everything so big that there is room in the glass for only the smallest particle of it—not enough of it to make it different from any other thing that is dissimilar.

Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.

The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.

There are all kinds of truth ... but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.

Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.

Someone once told the Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor that it is more open-minded to think that the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is a great, wonderful, powerful symbol. Her response was, "If it's only a symbol, to hell with it.

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one truth and that is that there is no truth... No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.

Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.

She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.

Anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his life.

One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for.

The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.

I couldn't make any judgment on the Summa, except to say this: I read it for about twenty minutes every night before I go to bed. If my mother were to come in during this process and say, 'Turn off that light. It's late,' I with a lifted finger and broad bland beatific expression, would reply, 'On the contrary, I answer that the light, being eternal and limitless, cannot be turned off. Shut your eyes,' or some such thing.

I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.

There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one truth and that is that there's no truth

As was usual with him, he began with the least important thing and worked around and in toward the center where the meaning was.

Living had got to be such a habit with him that he couldn't conceive of any other condition.