Quotes About Perspective

Life is what happens, Magnus, no matter what you expect or want.

You see, there are few objective limits. What they teach you is useful, but never accept the proposition that just because a solution satisfies a problem, that it must be the only solution.

One of the problems with being my age is you look at everyone who is younger as children, and when everyone else around you is younger, it means you live in a universe of children. So you tend to scold more than is proper.

People most often don't see what is right before them.

Life has shown me all too often it's a fragile gift. Remember, no one gets out of life alive.

I know, when we are young we cannot entertain the idea another's feelings can be as deep as our own. Our love is so much loftier, our pain so much more intense.

There is no magic, only tricks.

when you enter another's reality, you observe her rules. Then

Vidiš, veoma je malo stvarnih ogreni?enja. Sve ?emu te u?e je korisno, ali nikad ne prihvataj tvrdnju da je neko rešenje *jedino* rešenje samo ako uspe da reši problem.

History is written by victors," said Duko. "But I have little use for history. It is the future with which I am concerned.

It's tempting to think of yourself as powerful when those around you are far less so, but compared to the simple fact of existence, to the power of life and how it hangs on, we are nothing.

Then don't assume you need to be the one to make the sacrifice. Don't hold your own needs as less important than other people's.

You would never look at yourself as "evil" no matter what the other fellow thought of what you did. It's in our nature. And that's the great secret of evil. It is never viewed as evil by those who perpetrate the evil.

T]here are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.

The visitor sees beauty; the inhabitant a place where he works and has his friends.

Philosophical thinking that doesn't do violence to one's settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.

And the freest of all is the philosopher who thinks so little of the ceaseless flow of time as to step out of it. This is why the philosopher often appears ridiculous in the practical affairs of life, because he or she has stepped out of the rush of time.

Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance. We don't see it, because we see with it.

Exiting the ideological cave, where all our questions are answered and everyone we know agrees with us, is the hardest and most significant step we can take. But if we don't take that step, then we will leave this life no closer to the truth than when we entered it. And that is exactly what it is to live a life not worth living, even if it proves to be the most pleasant sort of existence.

Albert Einstein once stated: "The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." It is not until we understand our limited thinking that we can choose to alter it and ourselves.

Oh, to be half as wonderful as my children thought I was when he was small, and only half as stupid as my teenager now thinks I am.

The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.

The coolness of Buddhism isn't indifference but the distance one gains on emotions, the quiet place from which to regard the turbulence. From far away you see the pattern, the connections, and the thing as whole, see all the islands and the routes between them. Up close it all dissolves into texture and incoherence and immersion, like a face going out of focus just before a kiss.

Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time.