Quotes About Perspective

Life is a tragedy for those who feel...but a comedy for those who think

You think the only people who are people, are the people who look and think like you. But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger, you'll learn things you never knew you never knew.

Whether you say you can't or you can, you're right.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

Don't take life so serious. It ain't nohow permanent.

Don't take life so serious, son...it ain't no how permanent. --Porky Pine, June 19-24, 1950

Looking back on things, the view always improves.

As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.

The Real War Will Never Get in the Books. And so good-bye to the war.

Books are not men—

I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.

You and I are not what we eat; we are what we think.

In truth, poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.

A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions said that the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it.

We see but one aspect of our neighbor, as we see but one side of the moon; in either case there is also a dark half, which is unknown to us. We all come down to dinner, but each has a room to himself.

The abstract thinking of the world is never to be expected of persons in high places...

History is written by the victors.

This is the old way of thinking, and most people think first as they have been taught to think; and next, as they see others think.

People of faith can read the Bible so that almost any perspective on a current issue will find some support in the Bible. That rich and multivoiced offering in the Bible is what makes appeals to it so tempting—and yet so tricky and hazardous, because much of our reading of the Bible turns out to be an echo of what we thought anyway. THE ISSUE OF LAND The dispute between Palestinians and Israelis is elementally about land and secondarily about security and human rights.

Cynicism always comes clothed in "realism". The alternatives to begin with an act of imagination. Can we imagine another way?

Clearly, human transformative activity depends upon a transformed imagination. Numbness does not hurt like torture, but in a quite parallel way, numbness robs us of our capability for humanity.

So in Psalm 73, when life is inequitable, the speaker is aware of a skewed relationship in which one is less than human: When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was stupid and ignorant; I was like a brute beast toward you. (Ps. 73:21-22; cf. 102:7-8)49

To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest that we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.

Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.