Quotes About Perspective

No hay nada nuevo bajo el sol, pero hay muchas cosas viejas que nosotros no sabemos.

AUTHENTIC, adj. Indubitably true — in somebody's opinion.

ALCOHOL, n. (Arabic al kohl, a paint for the eyes.) The essential principle of all.

OPTIMISM, n. The doctrine, or belief, that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong.

May it please your honour, crimes are ghastly or agreeable only by comparison.

LIFE, n. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay. We live in daily apprehension of its loss; yet when lost it is not missed. The question, Is life worth living? has been much discussed; particularly by those who think it is not, many of whom have written at great length in support of their view and by careful observance of the laws of health enjoyed for long terms of years the honors of successful controversy.

HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

IMMIGRANT, n. An unenlightened person who thinks one country better than another.

CHRISTIAN, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.

ARGUE, v.t. To tentatively consider with the tongue.

My cousin tried to kill me today, he said. He realized that his voice held an edge of hysteria. She nearly succeeded. But I guess that's fair, since I was trying to kill her at the time.

If you want to know a country, read its writers.

He seemed to remember a sense of fearlessness as a child, for lacking the knowledge of death, he supposed, for still believing bad things happened only to other people. How long you held on to that particular belief depended on where you were born.

What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing.

In this world, what is here is not necessarily here, and what is now may not really be now: place and time are malleable, and everything is seen through a haze of probabilities, rather than with certainty.

Is it not amazing, Puggly dear, that whenever we begin to congratulate ourselves on the breadth of our knowledge of the world, we discover that there are multitudes of people, in every corner of the earth, who have seen vastly more than we can ever hope to?

He said: 'You don't understand. We never thought that we were being used to conquer people. Not at all: we thought the opposite. We were told that we were freeing those people. That is what they said—that we were going to set those people free from their bad kings or their evil customs or some such thing. We believed it because they believed it too. It took us a long time to understand that in their eyes freedom exists wherever they rule.

Young love is a treasure truly wasted on the young,

A cynic might observe that the scriptures can be used to support both sides of every argument.

To the starving man, bread is beautiful. To the homeless man, a roof is beautiful. To the drunkard, wine is beautiful. Only those who want for nothing else need find beauty in a lump of rock. "Stolicus

you should laugh every moment you live, for you'll find it decidedly difficult afterwards.

Enough to make a man believe in God,' said Temple. 'And that He's somewhere else.

You have to learn to love the small things in life... you have to love the small things, when you've nothing else.

Who says there even is a real Shenkt? People like things that are simple. Black and white. Good and evil. They want to make a choice and tell themselves they were right. But as His Eminence is fond of saying, the real world is painted in greys. The truth is complicated, full of mixed emotions and blurred outcomes and each-way bets. The truth … is a hard sell.