Quotes About Perspective

It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.

One lives too long. Happy X-mas.

There are times when a man must act as though life were equally sweet in any company.

They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything

Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust, but your minds.

Now who art thou, that on the bench wouldst sit In judgment at a thousand miles away, With the short vision of a single span?

Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse.

It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset.

The time therefore that any man doth live, is but a little, and the place where he liveth, is but a very little corner of the earth, and the greatest fame that can remain of a man after his death, even that is but little, and that too, such as it is whilst it is, is by the succession of silly mortal men preserved, who likewise shall shortly die, and even whiles they live know not what in very deed they themselves are: and much less can know one, who long before is dead and gone.

he takes things as he finds them, and makes enjoyment of them somehow or other

Joseph Devlin

The most important "endowment," from our perspective, is a society's learning capacities (which in turn is affected by the knowledge that it has; its knowledge about learning itself; and its knowledge about its own learning capacities)

Bette Newboldt, our unappeasable feminist whom, I'm fairly certain, God Himself could not have made happy;

College education is highly overrated. Take it from a man who dispensed it.

Distortion of view takes place when we hold so deeply to our viewpoint that not even known facts can sway our beliefs.

Because these moods and mind states are so amorphous and generalized, we often sink into them and become identified with them, and they become the unconscious filter on experience. At these times, we're looking at the world through colored glasses.

The perception of solidity also comes from observing things from a distance. When we look at an ordinary object like a chair or a table, it appears quite solid. Yet if we put that same object under a powerful microscope, whole new worlds emerge. When we look at trees from a distance, we just see an undifferentiated mass of color. But as we get closer, we can distinguish individual leaves, and even the small distinct parts of the leaves.

If I were to say, 'God, why me?' about the bad things, then I should have said, 'God, why me?' about the good things that happened in my life.

There is no right and no wrong, but right is right and wrong is wrong.

Ask yourself how many of the billions of inhabitants of this planet have any idea of how rare it is to have been born as a human being.

As individuals, we have enormous difficulty thinking the negative. We see patterns all around us, and each new day brings new evidence that confirms our belief in them. Thinking through the hypothetical "What if I am wrong?" is not something that comes naturally. Having other people around whose sole interest lies in doing just that not only serves as an external corrective, it also pushes us to think in a way that our thoughts do not naturally go.

Where were you born? On a battlefield, [Yossarian] answered. No, no. In what state were you born? In a state of innocence.

But Yossarian knew he was right, because, as he explained to Clevinger, to the best of his knowledge he had never been wrong.

I used to think it was immoral to be unhappy.