Quotes About Perspective

Whoever thou art that, not content with a moderate condition, imaginest happiness in royal magnificence, and dreamest that command or riches can feed the appetite of novelty with perpetual gratifications, survey the Pyramids, and confess thy folly!

The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!

You never find people labouring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful fortune. -- So you hear people talking how miserable a King must be; and yet they all wish to be in his place.

He who forms his opinion of himself in solitude, without knowing the powers of other men, is very liable to error. - On Alexander Pope

When a man knows he is to be hanged in the morning, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment.

One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

Every man adheres as long as he can to his own pre-conceptions.

Regret and pangs of conscience are feelings we assign to others to make the world seem a little more fair, to even things out a little and provide consolation. In reality, those who do wrong to us never think about us as much as we think about them, and that is the ultimate irony: their deeds live inside us, festering, while they live out in the world, plucking peaches off trees, biting juicily into them, their minds on things lovely and sweet.

I am not apt to run into grave declamations against the times:

What poor wretches are we, Harriet, men as well as women! We pray for long life; and what is the issue of our prayers, but leave to outlive our teeth and our friends, to stand in the way of our elbowing relations, and to change our swan-skins for skins of buff; which nevertheless will keep out neither cold nor infirmity?

Even now that I have concluded this moving recapitulation, it seems as nothing; and the whole world, my dear is as a bit of dirt under my feet.

Upon my word, I believe, you men think, it is no matter for us women to have any consciences, so as we do but study your wills, and do our duty by you. Men look upon themselves as gods of the earth, and on us women but as their ministring servants! — But I did not expect that you would be so unreasonable.

Il filosofo che contemplava il teschio di un re e quello di un povero, non vi ravvisò differenza.

Odd characters, my dear, are needful to make even characters shine. You good girls would not be valued as you are, if there were not bad ones.

I have lived to a great age: Yet to look backward to the time of my youth, when I was not a stranger to the hopes and fears that now agitate you, what a short space does it seem to be!

Sabrina: "But you don't believe in marriage." Linus: "Yes, I do. It's why I've never married.

I'm beginning to think that the world is divided into two kinds of men: those you can marry and don't want to; those you want to marry and can't.

La jeunesse contemple le Bonheur qui scintille loin devant elle – l'âge contemple le Bonheur qui scintille loin derrière lui. C'est le Bonheur de l'âge que de contempler a posteriori le Bonheur de la Jeunesse; et faute d'espérer, nous nous souvenons avec plaisir que nous avons espéré.

A man might not like it, but men had so many advantages that it didn't matter if occasionally they had to do stuff they didn't think was really fair.

Answers are the opiate of the people!

That which you focus on will expand in your life. And if you're constantly noticing what you lack, then the deficiencies in your life will become overwhelming.

She hadn't been taught to have prejudices, so she didn't.

It was difficult to sympathize with a protagonist whose dilemma was mild when compared to her own.