Quotes About Perspective

As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.

There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.

It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.

We mark some days as fair, some as foul, because we do not see that the character of every day as identical

My opinion was that if hogs are biting you so often that you have to stop and make up a specific word for it, maybe lack of vocabulary is not your most pressing problem.

Children don't judge their own lives. Normal for them is what's laid before them day by day. Judgment comes later.

He floated along thinking he would like to love the world as it was, and he felt a great deal of accomplishment for the occasions when he did, since the other was so easy.

Even on the worst days, details of her old life seemed like a museum exhibition, artifacts to study and understand in historical context.

Literacy: Blessing? Or curse?

I don't know facts, and probably there aren't any to know. Whatever crazy thing people want to believe, that's what they call it, a fact.

Remembering doesn't change anything—it will always have happened. But forgetting won't erase it either.

He had long since decided there was little usefulness in speculating much on what a day will bring. It led a person to the equal errors of being either dreadful or hopeful. Neither, in his experience, served to ease your mind.

So, standing here looking at you, all grown up, the question I ask is simple. In the long run, how different is a goddam hot dog from a Vienna sausage?

It does your mind good to talk to people different from you.

You have to get your mind right, and always look way down the road, not at your feet.

An imaginary planet has a role like a clown in a Shakespeare play. Every so often an audience needs a breather, a fresh view. Other planets provide that. But every time I write about another planet it is deliberately so unrealistic that people can't really believe it. In a way it makes our own planet more important, more real."66

semiologists would agree is that one simply cannot speak of "meaning" as if it were one thing that we can all know or share. The concept meaning is multivalent, has many meanings itself…

If you wish to be miserable, think about yourself, about what you want, what you like, what respect people ought to pay you, what people think of you; and then to you nothing will be pure. You will spoil everything you touch; you will make sin and misery for yourself out of everything God sends you; you will be as wretched as you choose.

You philosophers, however raised above your own bodies you may be, must really not forget we poor worldlings have bones to be broken.

That Enough Is As Good As a Feast' ...The inventor of [this saying] did not believe it himself....Goodly legs and shoulders of mutton, exhilarating cordials, books, pictures, the opportunities of seeing foreign countries, independence, heart's ease, a man's own time to himself, are not muck — however we may be pleased to scandalise with that appellation the faithful metal that provides them for us.

Reader, if you wrest my words beyond their fair construction, it is you, and not I, that are the April Fool.

Where do you want to go? was his responce. I don't know Alice answered. Then, said the cat, it doesn't matter.

Never judge someone by their relatives.

He picked up one of Lorna's roses and set it in my lap. Here. I picked it up and smelled it. He poked me in the shoulder. See what I mean? Thorns don't stop you from sniffing. Or putting them in a vase on the kitchen table. You work around them.... Cause the rose is worth it... Think what you'd miss.