Quotes About Perspective

Did Revere make history or did Longfellow?

On the whole, as the morbid & mucilaginous monkey said when he climbed up to the top of the Palm-tree & found no fruit there - one can't depend upon dates.

It would also require a conscious effort to look at the world from unfamiliar standpoints and admit that the West has no monopoly on truth or virtue.

The advantages of being raised on the right side of the tracks are too implicit to be enumerated. It is the few who have escaped who grasp the full impotence of those they have left behind. After

For those who still believe our age's disruptions match what happened after 1870, ask yourself which you would first give up, your iPhone or the flush toilet? Laptop or antibiotics? If you have trouble answering those, ponder life without electricity. It is a measure of our solipsism that we take for granted what went before.

Tell it like it never really was and maybe we'll see it like it is.

While trying harder helps just about everything, telling someone with ADD to try harder is no more helpful than telling someone who is nearsighted to squint harder. It missed the biological point.

The clinician's challenge is to find a way to allow the ADD person to put on the brakes. From a biological perspective, one of the most successful strategies has been the use of medications.

Worry gives a small thing a big shadow. Swedish proverb

To tell a person who has ADD to try harder is about as helpful as telling someone who is nearsighted to squint harder.

The historian must have some conceptions of how men who are not historians behave.

There are different ways of evil and I prefer mine to yours.

At that moment Jack reached an insight, one he never forgot: a bee in a story could tickle worse than a real bee. He realized, too, that a story peach could be sweeter than a real peach, a story flower more fragrant than a real flower, a story song more melodious than a real song. What existed in a story could be more real than what existed in the world. And by reaching this insight, Jack understood the true power of his art.

I'm not particularly precious about the theatrical experience any more.

A reasonable amount o' fleas is good fer a dog-keeps him from broodin' over bein' a dog, mebbe.

As Princeton Newport Partners closed I reflected on the proposition that what matters in life is how you spend your time. When J. Paul Getty was the richest man in the world and manifestly not fulfilled, he said the happiest time of his life was when he was sixteen, riding waves off the beach in Malibu, California.

Heller said he had something the rich man could never have. When a puzzled Vonnegut asked what that could be, Heller answered, "The knowledge that I've got enough.

Looking down, the student exclaimed, "Look, there is a $100 bill on the ground." Without a glance down or a break in stride, Fama replied, "No, there isn't. If there were, someone would have picked it up already.

Here indeed is a major difference between people and ants: where we send our young men to war, ants send their old ladies. No moral lesson there, unless you are looking for a less expensive form of elder care.

The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world.

to get hold of the human condition, we need next a much broader definition of history than is conventionally used.

So what could the hypothetical aliens learn from us that has any value to them? The correct answer is the humanities.

Earth relates to the Universe as the second segment of the left antenna of an aphid sitting on a flower petal in a garden in Teaneck, New Jersey, for a few hours this afternoon.

The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.