Quotes About Perspective

only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony—which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value. I can't imagine anything worse than that. Okay, maybe I can, but imagine reading the morning newspaper and believing it all to be true on some level.

Cronkite was always one step short of disillusionment.

To put that statistic into personal terms, make a list of the nineteen people closest to you: All but one will die. (This

Denying the existence of things beyond our knowledge is as dangerous as promoting them.

Are you surprised? He doesn't believe in any power greater than himself. And we all know he's God-like anyway—in his own mind, at least.

sometimes she didn't know her own strength, and she didn't understand that people were a lot more fragile than she was. Sometimes she was rougher than she intended, you see. Did you know that a full-grown female chimpanzee is three to five times stronger than a man?

Anyway, these conclusions came from people who had never spent any time with chimpanzees. You can't tell anything from a two-hour videotape. I spent five years with five chimpanzees. There are so many modes of communication between human and chimp that can't be quantified. Body language. Vehemence and speed of gesture, facial expression. You had to be there with Jennie to understand the depth of communication. With our enemies out there, and a Senator against us, we got hammered.

like having death poke his stinking mug into your face to make you think about things.

The New World was like a vast, tinder-dry forest waiting to burn—and Columbus brought the fire.

Do you know, I've always believed there's no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written—that's all.

looking across the bay toward Staten Island.

When we see the world through our thoughts, we stop experiencing life as it really is and others as they really are. When I have a thought about you, that's something I've created. I've turned you into an idea. In a certain sense, if I have an idea about you that I believe, I've degraded you. I've made you into something very small. This is the way of human beings, this is what we do to each other.

Everything, in its way, is a gift—even the painful things. In reality, all of life—every moment, every experience—is an expression of spirit.

The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to answer your questions, but to question your answers.

All of a sudden there I was, standing there, holding my plate my of food at this wedding, and there was the realization that even though I don't see things the way most people around me see them, this is it. This is life, and it is absolutely wonderful, amazingly beautiful. The only thing left for me to do was to walk back into the world.

I can't do that." Those belief structures are by their very nature based in unreality.

The truth, I would suggest, is that you poured yourself willingly into form out of infinite love in order to redeem the entirety of this life. When seen from that perspective, all of a sudden life looks very different. You stop holding back from life, your inner life or the life around you, because the kingdom of heaven is within and all around you. That's the message of the Jesus story.

Thinking is something and then feeling it are two different reference points for most human beings: If I think it and I feel it, then it is real. But it does not take much reflection to acknowledge we have all thought and felt things to be true that later found out were not.

In meditation you are not trying to change your experience; you are changing your relationship to your experience.

Confound those who have said our remarks before us.

Oh, it is easy for the one who stands outside the prison-wall of pain to exhort and teach the one who suffers.

Old age hath stronger sense of right than youth.

For wherein is life sweet to him who suffers grief?

I gave them hope, and so turned away their eyes from death