Quotes About Perspective

With novelists, names and dates are wrong, the rest is true. With historians, names and dates are correct, the rest is false.

but there is no point reading too much into success stories because we do not see the full picture.

A nerd is simply someone who thinks exceedingly inside the box.

notion of alternative accounting: $ 10 million earned through Russian roulette does not have the same value as $ 10 million earned through the diligent and artful practice of dentistry.

Notice that close to two centuries ago people had an idealized opinion of their own past, just as we have an idealized opinion of today's past.

because we take what we know a little too seriously.

Plutarch, Livy, Suetonius, Diodorus Siculus, Gibbon, Carlyle, Renan, and Michelet.

Diagoras asked, "Where were the pictures of those who prayed, then drowned?" The drowned worshippers, being dead, would have a lot of trouble advertising their experiences from the bottom of the sea.

Not only is it difficult for the journalist to think more like a historian, but it is, alas, the historian who is becoming more like the journalist.

regretted not having insisted on speaking in Arabic

the tendency to look at what confirms our knowledge, not our ignorance)

best way to detect a sucker is to see if his focus is on the size of the theater rather than that of the door.

which people, in order to avoid inconsistent beliefs, rationalize that, say, the grapes they can't reach got to be sour).

So the reader can imagine my state of mind when

Most people in the real world don't obsess over it.

We respect what has happened, ignoring what could have happened.

There is no absolute measure of good or bad. It is not what you are telling people, it is how you are saying it.

This, perhaps, is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one's ego.fn3

The good is mostly in the absence of bad";

since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside.

Your life came under a serious threat but, having survived it, you retrospectively underestimate how risky the situation actually was.

the only effective judge of things is time

why does reading the newspaper actually decrease your knowledge of the world?

He is not you, not a member of your family, so he has no direct emotional loss should your health experience a degradation.