Quotes About Perspective

98. Look for the Extraordinary in the Ordinary I heard a story about two workers who were approached by a reporter. The reporter asked the first worker, "What are you doing?" His response was to complain that he was virtually a slave, an underpaid bricklayer who spent his

Do I want to be 'right'—or do I want to be happy?

Life isn't an emergency.

I've never met anyone (myself included) who hasn't turned little things into great big emergencies. We take our own goals so seriously that we forget to have fun along the way, and we forget to cut ourselves some slack. We take simple preferences and turn them into conditions for our own happiness. Or, we beat ourselves up if we can't meet our self-created deadlines.

two rules of harmony. #1) Don't sweat the small stuff, and #2) It's all small stuff.

The trick is to be grateful for our good moods and graceful in our low moods—not taking them too seriously.

In low moods we lose our perspective and everything seems urgent. We completely forget that when we are in a good mood, everything seems so much better.

It suggests that life is filled with opportunities to choose between making a big deal out of something or simply letting it go, realizing it doesn't really matter. If you choose your battles wisely, you'll be far more effective in winning those that are truly important.

Contrary to popular belief, negative feelings don't need to be studied and analyzed. When you analyze your negative feelings, you'll usually end up with more of them to contend with. The

When you take time, often, to reflect on the miracle of life—the miracle that you are even able to read this book—the gift of sight, of love, and all the rest, it can help to remind you that many of the things that you think of as "big stuff" are really just "small stuff" that you are turning into big stuff.

Life isn't all it's cracked up to be. Nothing is ever good enough the way it is.

Don't talk rot, Whitney, said Rainsford. You're a big-game hunter, not a philosopher. Who cares how a jaguar feels?

One of the cold hard truths that men need to get used to, is that, whenever someone has a problem with facts, the problem isn't with the facts.

The woman you marry is never the same woman you divorce.

We are careless of that which is near us, and follow that which is afar off, to which we will travel and sail beyond the seas.

We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara.

Undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

the Genesis story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point. . . . The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.

I don't give a damn for anybody's opinion, I only care about the facts. So I'm not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where factual matters are concerned.

I am not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where facts are concerned.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.