Quotes About Perspective

The mark of intellectual honesty is the solicitation of opposing points of view.

pilot might think a 1-percent chance of being shot down on a given mission acceptable, then realize that fifty such missions made it a 40-percent chance.

That was the problem with Europeans. No optimism, too often they looked for things that would go wrong instead of right.

I try not to think of these things. I choose to fix my eyes on Jesus Christ.

What I thought was sacrifice was actually just inconvenience.

It was not that her life was so tragic but that she found gloom more interesting than the everyday world.

The Arda Viraf ("Viraf the just"), which was probably written during the Sassanid period, tells the story of a devout Zoroastrian who travels to heaven and hell and returns to Earth to report what he found. Several centuries later, Dante Alighieri (1265–1341) would write a similar but much longer work, the Divine Comedy, from a Christian perspective.

Wir kommen uns klein vor unter den Sternen, aber paradoxerweise fühlen wir uns mehr bei uns. Wir sind, wer wir sind.

We feel small under the stars, yet paradoxically we feel more ourselves. We are who we are.

After all, why be right when you can be happy.

If you keep things simple, and look to the end, not the problems in the way, most things turn out to be possible.

The fact that he hated and feared his new environment was largely beside the point, for he had been taught long ago that what he thought and felt about any given subject was without question the least important thing in the world.

You'd have to crush a dozen Alexanders in an olive-press before you could extract enough humanity to make up an ordinary person. As a human being, he was tiny.

Work doesn't have to feel like "Work with a capital W." You should be able to feel passion, purpose, and meaning in whatever you do. And that shift in perspective can open up a world of possibilities.

flipping"—changing from one state of mind to another.

Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.

Something had happened to him ove the past couple of years, something to do with being home with Aaron, sinking into the rhythm of a kid's day. The little tasks, the small pleasures. The repetition that goes beyond boredom and becomes a kind of peace. You do it long enough, and the adult world starts to drift away. You can't catch up with it, not even if you try.

we read fiction to satisfy a more basic need—to imagine our way into other lives, to explore characters and situations that tell us something new about the world, and maybe about ourselves, or to remind us of something important that we may have forgotten.

the big day hadn't gone the way she'd hoped, not that big days ever did. Birthdays

If we'd been on speaking terms, I might've told her that I'd come to think of sex as this long dark tunnel that turns friends into strangers, strangers into friends.

There was a gulf between those who had had their community smashed and their future thrown completely into question, and those for whom life still moved in an intelligible stream. It was not unlike the line that separated those who had come back from the war and those whose lives had been going on continuously while they had been away.

There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.

Strange, how seldom a person knows which days of his life are tragic and which are happy

I believe in everything; nothing is sacred. I believe in nothing; everything is sacred. Ha Ha Ho Ho Hee Hee.