Quotes About Perspective

Argument is meant to reveal the truth, not to create it.

Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.

Studies have shown that 90% of error in thinking is due to error in perception. If you can change your perception, you can change your emotion and this can lead to new ideas.

Sometimes the situation is only a problem because it is looked at in a certain way. Looked at in another way, the right course of action may be so obvious that the problem no longer exists.

The image that concerns most people is the reflection they see in other people's minds.

To cultivate a pleasure in being wrong sounds perverse, yet losing an argument means escaping from an old idea and the acquisition of a new way of looking at things.

The difference between the Russian character and the Western is that we Russians have learned to live our days in the full knowledge that whatever transpires in the interim, the sun will eventually expand and humanity will be incinerated. It's a way of life precisely opposite to the American Dream. Call is Russian fatalism if you like. But it gives us a sense of perspective, a sense of humor, and perhaps a certain dignity.

Half the world is screaming for water and freedom when the other half is ordering cocktails and complaining about the service.

Through forty years of impatience, Nicholas still could not make up his mind which was more annoying, the guile of straight women or the wiles of gay men.

It's always the case that history is a tale told by the victors. But the triumph of the scientific worldview has been so complete that we've lost more than the losing side's version of history. We've lost the idea that a view different from ours is even possible. Today we take for granted that originality is a word of praise. New strikes us as nearly synonymous with improved. But for nearly all of human history, a new idea was a dangerous idea.

But wait till Ike had to deal with de Gaulle, whom I had seen in the Middle East. Giraud then would seem to Ike the acme of rational and complaisant Frenchmen.

If I agreed with you we'd both be wrong.

Ask the man who owns one.

Every picture tells a story.

Confucius say: "Baseball wrong — man with four balls cannot walk."

Oliver Wendell Holmes once attended a meeting in which he was the shortest man present. "Dr. Holmes," quipped a friend, "I should think you'd feel rather small among us big fellows." "I do," retorted Holmes, "I feel like a dime among a lot of pennies."

After you've heard two eyewitness accounts of an auto accident, you begin to worry about history.

Traveler: "God has been mighty good to your fields, Mr. Farmer." Farmer: "You should have seen how he treated them when I wasn't around."

The referees have always been blind, it's our job to make them deaf.

At 13,000 feet nothing else matters.

Sometimes it is useful to know how large your zero is.

A picture, it is said, is worth a thousand words, but cannot a few well-spoken words convey as many pictures?

Climb a tree — it gets you closer to heaven.

Swimming: From the outside looking in, you can