Quotes About Perspective

As anyone who has ever started with a high concept and then worked backward to find numbers to fit the theory knows, it is not unusual for the theory to make a lot of sense "in hindsight.

Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?" (Thoreau).

You young people are always so obsessed with truth. The truth is often overrated.

Stop searching yourself trying to understand why someone else treated you the way they did. The answer is not inside you; it's inside them, out of reach.

I believe that I am past my prime. I had reckoned on my prime lasting till I was at least fifty.

But how could you measure your own pain against the pain of the world?

On the wall was a dress that I embroidered. It said Ich Habe Genug. Which is a Bach Cantata. Which I once thought meant I've had it, I can't take anymore, give me a break. But I was wrong. It means I have enough. And that is utterly true. I happen to be alive. End of discussion. But I will go out and buy a hat.

You have a faculty for defining the simplest in terms of the grandiose, so that a poor devil like me can't understand it.

You see, you are an optimist and live on hope. I am a pessimist and live on experience.

They tell you that you'll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don't tell you is that you won't miss it very much.

Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions . . . by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.

Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push—in just the right place—it can be tipped.

To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.

Don't look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger's world.

They were so focused on the mechanics and the process that they never looked at the problem holistically. In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.

Why is a two-year-old so terrible? Because she is systematically testing the fascinating and, to her, utterly novel notion that something that gives her pleasure might not actually give someone else pleasure—and the truth is that as adults we never lose that fascination.

they would have worried for my soul. Pronin calls this phenomenon the "illusion of asymmetric insight." She writes: The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.

What Jaffe proved was that the powerful have to worry about how others think of them-that those who give orders are acutely vulnerable to the opinions of those whom they are ordering about.

The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell. I say trick but what I really mean is challenge, because it's a very hard thing to do.

Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from—and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.

So here is the question: once the number-one form of suicide in England became a physiological impossibility, did the people who wanted to kill themselves switch to other methods? Or did the people who would have put their heads in ovens now not commit suicide at all?

You've got to let people work out the situation and work out what's happening. The danger in calling is that they'll tell you anything to get you off their backs, and if you act on that and take it at face value, you could make a mistake. Plus you are diverting them. Now they are looking upward instead of downward. You're preventing them from resolving the situation.

at the University of Oklahoma. He spent his summers on a farm in Pennsylvania, not far from Roseto—although that, of course, didn't mean much, since Roseto was so much in its own world that it was possible to live in the next town and never know much about it. "One of the times when we were up

Whenever we have something that we are good at - something we care about - that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions. This does not mean that when we are outside our areas of passion and experience, our reactions are invariably wrong. It just means that they are shallow. They are hard to explain and easily disrupted. They aren't grounded in real understanding.