Quotes About Perspective

Progress is a set of assumptions.

Being different is ... interesting; there's nothing implicitly inferior or superior about it. Great difference, of course, produces natural caution; and if the differences are too extreme ... well, then, reality tends to fade away.

What I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing-cards when you're a kid, and pornographic playing-cards when you're older. It's that when you're a kid you use the cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when you're older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.

Read the great stuff but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.

Well, when you write about people of a certain age ... we are in a postsexual situation. If I write about younger people then I write sexually, because their drive is sexual. It depends upon the circumstances.

Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.

the path to change is not through greater willpower and harder work, but rather through thinking differently.

Two men are walking in the woods. A ferocious grizzly bear charges at them and they start to run. While running, they shout: Man 1: We'll never outrun the bear. Man 2: I don't have to. My only question is "Can I outrun you?

Remember: Extraordinary people are just ordinary people who are thinking differently—and that could be you. Ordinary

Sadly, many people spend their entire lives focusing on the wrong questions. They may pursue money, when they really want happiness. They may pursue the respect of people whose favor is really not worthy of being sought.

A picture is worth a thousand words— unless the picture is distorted.

Whenever you "see" an issue or "understand" a concept, be conscious of the lens through which you're viewing the subject. You should assume you're introducing bias. The challenge remains to identify and let go of that bias or the assumptions you bring, and actively work to see and understand the subject anew.

The effect of change in surroundings is like that of lapse of time in making the past seem remote.

When I saw that things which were to me so intolerable moved them not at all, that words that melted my heart to speak had only offended them with the speaker, I was at first stunned and then overcome with a desperate sickness and faintness at the heart

It is axiomatic that men who know little are often intolerant of a point of view that is contrary to their own. The bitterness that has been brought about by arguments on public questions is proverbial. Lovers have been parted by bitter quarrels on theories of pacificism or militarism; and when an argument upon an abstract question engages opponents they often desert the main line of arguments in order to abuse each other.

He who esteems trifles for themselves is a trifler; he who esteems them for the conclusions to be drawn from them, or the advantage to which they can be put, is a philosopher.

He who studies old books will always find in them something new, and he who reads new books will always find in them something old.

Après quatre mois d'emprisonnement, j'en sais plus sur la justice qu'après deux années d'université.

Poor Jerry. He's giving all of himself to something he's got to loose. -So does everybody...sooner or later. -Freeze on that. -On what? -On all that heavy philosophy bullshit. I'm talking about here and now and everyday important things that people live by. If you extrapolate everything-nothing matters.

A bird in the hand is worth plucking, frying, and sticking between two bits of bread.

What is a life? That is what we were left with: stories. They were our clothes.

I collect the walks of my life. Some people have asked me if I have walked so very far to merit such an activity, but I say to them, it's not about how far you have walked, but how thoroughly.

The best philosophy doesn't just come up with a few new facts that we can simply add to our stock of information, or a few new maxims to extend our list of dos and don'ts, but embodies a picture of the world and/or a set of values.

Logic will never change emotion or perception.