Quotes About Perspective

When the same qualities which we admire in ourselves are seen in others, even though they be superior, maliciously lower and carp at them.

They who take it amiss that the world was not sooner   created, may as well expostulate with God for not having made   innumerable worlds.

As a consequence, we must infer that man is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God's majesty.

We see how mankind,   without well thinking what they are doing, pursue, with impetuous and   ardent affections, the transitory things of this world; but, in thus   catching at the empty shadow of a happy life, they lose true happiness   itself. In

Men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God.

Convinced, however, we are not, if we look to ourselves only, and not to the Lord also

Accentuate the positive - eliminate the negative. And only the negative.

When we expand our thinking, we expand who we are as human beings: the perspective from which we view the world, and the concepts and values we use to guide our choices.

The world that was not mine yesterday now lies spread out at my feet, a splendor. I seem, in the middle of the night, to have returned to the world of apples, the orchards of Heaven. Perhaps I should take my problems to a shrink, or perhaps I should enjoy the apples that I have, streaked with color like the evening sky.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

Who could believe an ant in theory? A giraffe in blueprint? Ten thousand doctors of what's possible Could reason half the jungle out of being.

Too many people confuse being serious with being solemn.

Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.

Sense of Wonder (...) may be defined as a shift in perspective so that the reader, having been made suddenly aware of the true scale of an event or venue, responds to the revelation with awe.

Behind every statistic there is an individual, there is a story.

No book is really a fixed object. Every reader reads a book differently, and each book works in a different way on each reader.

But don't they say that all is fair in love and war? I heard that somewhere." "'They?' Who are 'they?'" "I don't know. Just people." "That's what the victorious claim, not the defeated; the powerful, not the powerless. 'All is fair.' 'The end justifies the means.' Is that what you believe?

In general it's a good idea to avoid people who take themselves too seriously. As individuals, we have only so much seriousness to go round, and people who take themselves very seriously don't have enough seriousness left over to take other people seriously. Instead they tend to look down on them, and are secretly pleased when they get stuff wrong, because they just prove to the too-serious types that they were right not to take them too seriously to begin with.

Every individual spends a lifetime trying to disprove Copernicus by placing him- or herself at the heart of existence, but a small core of diehards manages to turn it into an art.

They listened to the Beatles for most of the journey, and Hynes explained to Gackowska why Abbey Road was the band's best record, and how Sgt. Pepper's wasn't really a concept album, no matter what anyone claimed to the contrary. Then he had to explain to Gackowska what a concept album was, and a B side, until pretty soon he felt about a hundred years old and was tempted to check himself into a nursing home.

A book is a carrier, and the ideas contained within its covers are an infection waiting to be spread. They breed in men. They adapt according to the host. Books alter men, and men, in their turn, alter worlds.

I learned something that day: there may be worse things than arriving somewhere with your dog and leaving without him, but there aren't many.

The four ages of man, as far as Williamson was concerned, were confusion, anger, complacency, and grumpiness, but it was important to embrace them in the right order. The

As for dying, he didn't believe that he was frightened of it: the manner of it, perhaps, but not the fact of it. After all, he had reached an age where dying had started to become an objective reality instead of an abstract concept.