Quotes About Perspective

Political science has still to account for such facts as two nations attacking one another, each convinced that is is acting in self-defense, or two classes at war each certain that it speaks for the common interest. They live, we are likely to say, in different worlds. More accurately, they live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones.

The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event. That is why until we know what others think they know, we cannot truly understand their acts.

Laddove tutti pensano allo stesso modo, nessuno pensa un gran che

By putting the dead Germans in the focus of the picture, and by omitting to mention the French dead, a very special view of the battle was built up. It was a view designed to neutralize the effects of German territorial advances and the impression of power which the persistence of the offensive was making.

If wealth meant so little on this cold April night, did it mean so much the rest of the year?

We are all poets, really.

It was Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse who said that simply because a person is a member of a specific denomination, there is no reason to suppose that the entire denomination is represented by that person's theology

If flatness were funny, a dinner plate would be hilarious.

Nothing is what one thinks it is. Cloth is stone and circus is an art. There are no certainties.

Una buena mentira piadosa es con frecuencia mucho más excitante que una verdad. Es como si se pusiera a la verdad un vestido bonito.

Mein Freund der Dichter beschrieb nun die einfachsten Dinge, die er finden konnte",fuhr er fort, "und stellte fest, daß es das Schwierigste überhaupt war. Es war leicht, einen Palast aus Schnee und Eis zu beschreiben, aber unsäglich schwer, dasselbe mit einem einzelnen Haar zu tun. Oder einem Löffel. Einem Nagel. Einem Zahn. Einem Salzkorn. Einem Holzsplitter. Einer Kerzenflamme. Einem Wassertropfen.

Ist es nicht absurd, dass einem die Erinnerung an gute Zeiten viel eher die Tränen in die Augen treibt als die an schlechte?

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written, that's all.

The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.

We born dyin'...But you ask a man an' he talk like he gonna live forevah.

Once things have passed and become irretrievable, we tend to see them with a hazy, golden glow.

In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike.

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

General Douglas MacArthur was the most brilliant, most important, and most valuable military leader in American history—at least that's what Douglas MacArthur thought. When asked by a proper British gentlewoman if he had ever met the famous general, Dwight D. Eisenhower—himself about to march into history—supposedly replied, "Not only have I met him, ma'am; I studied dramatics under him for five years in Washington and four years in the Philippines.

Aléjate de vez en cuando de los temas que te preocupan, cambia de disco y deja que la mente se reorganice y adquiera una nueva perspectiva.

Las personas se podrían ubicar en un continuo de tal manera que podríamos hallar gente más o menos rígida, flexible o líquida, o con el predominio de un tipo de mente y pequeñas pinceladas de las otras.

Las personas dogmáticas cuentan con un "yo totalitario" que rechaza tajantemente cualquier información distinta a la que ya tienen. Si solamente creo en mí y pienso que los demás están equivocados, la intransigencia se multiplica de manera exponencial.

La clave para no caer en identificaciones falsas es aprender a discriminar la importancia real (objetiva, sin sesgos) de la importancia ficticia (exagerada y sin arraigo en la realidad) de las cosas o las personas con las que nos vinculamos.

Para un Yo ideal racional, que no sea malsano, se necesita una mezcla balanceada de ambición y realismo.