Quotes About Perspective

The one-eyed is always beauty in the land of the blind.

I'm starting to realize that being born into this social world is a little like being born into clean air. You take it in as soon as you breathe, and pretty soon you don't even realize that while you can walk around with clear lungs, other people are wearing oxygen masks just to survive.

I couldn't stop bawling, watching the towers come down. it was a terrible thing to happen. And a terrible thing to realize that I don't sit though the nigh crying when such horrors happen all the time.

The pursuit of truth is like picking raspberries. You miss a lot if you approach it from only one angle.

It is not literally true that a picture is worth a thousand words. Most people will not see what is in a picture, or will see it through the most readily available visual cliches. It takes training and an analytical vocabulary to talk about what is in a picture, and to know what to look for. A picture is worth a thousand words only for those who already have internalized an adequate vocabulary.

The outsider sees details as meaningless, or doesn't see the details at all. That is what makes most of us outsiders.

Nor did he regard his partial deafness as an impediment. He claimed that the deafness was actually an advantage, freeing him from time-wasting small talk and giving him undisturbed time to "think out my problems." Late in life he would say that he was fortunate to have been spared "all the foolish conversation and other meaningless sounds that normal people hear.

Really I began the day Not with a man's wish: "May this day be different," But with the birds' wish: "May this day Be the same day, the day of my life.

There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway: what is good is good without our saying so, and beneath all our majesty we know this.

The hunter and the mermaid were so different from each other that it seemed to them, finally, that they were exactly alike; and they lived together and were happy.

For a long time, whenever the hunter took off his clothes, she would laugh as if he were playing a trick on her, something magical but ridiculous. He would explain to her how useful and beautiful clothes are; she listened, always, with the same willing doubtful smile. She would have liked to be fooled, but it was more than she could manage; the hunter was the one clothed thing in a naked world.

One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

When I was young and miserable and pretty And poor, I'd wish What all girls wish: to have a husband, A house and children. Now that I'm old, my wish Is womanish: That the boy putting groceries in my car See me.

The days went by for him, all different and all the same. The boy was happy, and yet he didn't know that he was happy, exactly: he couldn't remember having been unhappy. If one day as he played at the edge of the forest some talking bird had flown down and asked him: "Do you like your life" he would not have known what to say, but would have asked the bird: "Can you not like it?

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

For the rest of us, the price of our inability to place ourselves in the fullness of world history has been crippling.

Thanks to subsequent years of conversations with evolutionists, especially Williams, and with medical school residents and faculty, he has found that an evolutionary perspective on patients' disorders has become steadily more natural and useful.

I am 25 today—it is terrible to think how little time remains!

No matter what we have come through, or how many perils we have safely passed, or how many imperfect and jagged - in some places perhaps irreparably - our life has been, we cannot in our heart of hearts imagine how it could have been different. As we look back on it, it slips in behind us in orderly array, and, with all its mistakes, acquires a sort of eternal fitness, and even, at times, of poetic glamour.

Many [Western Christians] habitually think and act as if there is no eternity. . . . We major in the momentary and minor in the momentous.

If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall.

If we could see our lives from God's perspective, many of us would be forced to admit that our lives are cluttered with all sorts of things that keep us from moving forward and receiving the abundant life he promises. We need to simplify our lives, eliminating the things that bog us down and keep us from doing what God says are priorities.

Though we are trained to answer questions, the questions we ask will determine our future. Your life today is the result of your answer to a question such as: : Is God real? :Is God going to provide for me? :Can I trust people? :Am I capable of doing that? The types of questions you ask have made you the way you are.

People would question anything having to do with God, but they wouldn't question their own questions. They would challenge the authority of a theologian, but they wouldn't challenge the authority of their buddy who claimed he had read a book that disproved the Bible.