Quotes About Perspective

The little ragged newsboy on the street stands, with wide-open mouth, and envies the business man as he alights from his automobile at the curb and starts into his office. "How happy I would be," the newsboy says to himself, "if I owned a Lizzie." And, the business man seated at his desk inside, thinks how happy he would be if he could add another million dollars to his already overswollen bank roll.

A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see

Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race "looking out for its best interests," as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.*

You need a story to displace a story.

You do not want to win an argument. You want to win.

much of what other people know isn't worth knowing.

We grossly overestimate the length of the effect of misfortune on our lives. You think that the loss of your fortune or current position will be devastating, but you are probably wrong. More likely, you will adapt to anything, as you probably did after past misfortunes.

My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.

the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals.

English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).

Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don't be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth—remember that you are a Black Swan.

You are rich if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.

One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic." Statistics stay silent in us.

History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history.

You view the world from within a model.

Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.

The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.

What they call philosophy I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip; and what they call gossip I call (generously) voyeurism.

To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers.

There is a Yiddish saying: "If I am going to be forced to eat pork, it better be of the best kind.

We have far too many ways to interpret past events for our own good.

You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.