Quotes About Perspective

See the stars at night. They seem so small to your eyes, but their light shines for millions of miles. Be like those stars— small in your own eyes, yet radiant to all.

A belief is not a fact; it is simply what we believe.

When life becomes difficult, allow yourself to feel the pain in the moment. Go with it for as long as it lasts, and then watch it dissolve away. Pleasure and pain are merely states of mind, rather than situations. Every situation is neutral.

Life it is not just a series of calculations and a sum total of statistics, it's about experience, it's about participation, it is something more complex and more interesting than what is obvious.

The stranger is often a person who can see and understand the context much better than a person who has lived there for a thousand years

When you're young you say, "If I become a vegetable, pull the plug!" You get older, you hedge a little. "If I'm a turnip, kill me. If I'm a trendier vegetable, like radicchio, mist me twice a day and trim the wilted leaves."

Histories, like all products of disciplinary knowledge, are made in the context of what their own frames will allow. It is the frames that one must stretch and bend.

The bottom line is this: the brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.

Now, some people will bemoan this fact, wag their fingers in your direction, and tell you sternly that you should live every minute of your life as though it were your last, which only goes to show that some people would spend their final ten minutes giving other people dumb advice. The

Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist's hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed.

Because we tend to remember the best of times and the worst of times instead of the most likely of times, the wealth of experience that young people admire does not always pay clear dividends.

We don't always see ourselves as superior, but we almost always see ourselves as unique. Even when we do precisely what others do, we tend to think that we're doing it for unique reasons.

Memory uses the filling-in trick, but imagination is the filling-in trick

There are many good things about getting older, but no one knows what they are.

the only thing these facts clearly show is that people tend to see what they want to see.

We insist on steering our boats because we think we have a pretty good idea of where we should go, but the truth is that much of our steering is in vain—not because the boat won't respond, and not because we can't find our destination, but because the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope. Just

It is difficult to escape the focus of our own attention–difficult to consider what it is we may not be considering–and this is one of the reasons why we so often mispredict our emotional responses to future events.

what we objectively get (wealth) is not the same as what we subjectively experience when we get it (utility).

Our parents are mysterious to us in ways that we can never quite be mysteries to them.

To be alive is to have a story to tell.

real tragedy is never a straightforward confrontation between Good and Evil, but is, rather, much more exquisitely and much more agonizingly, a conflict between two irreconcilable views of the world.

We all need narrative to make sense of the world.

The father knows the son whole, but the son can never know the father.

In Brueghel's hands, Ovid's tale of a son's willful rejection of his father's wisdom becomes a story about the need for a kind of humility—for, you might say, perspective; an admonition about what we miss when we are intent on our own narratives, about the dangers of mistaking the foreground for the whole picture.