Quotes About Perspective

History is lived forward but it is written in retrospect,' the English historian C.V. Wedgwood observed. 'We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.

This may sound sexist,' Joslyn said, 'but my theory is that men like the Civil War because it's an action story, they're caught up in the battlefield drama. The prisoners are an emotional side of the War. Women are attracted to all that raw feeling, we understand it better....

Life is a kaleidoscope, like I said. One minute things seem one way; next minute clicks you up a whole new picture.

Thinking 'economistically', as we have done now for thirty years, is not intrinsic to humans.

East and West, Asia and Europe, were always walls in the mind at least as much as lines on the earth

The past was neither as good nor as bad as we suppose: it was just different. If we tell ourselves nostalgic stories, we shall never engage the problems that face us in the present - and the same is true if we fondly suppose that our own world is better in every way. The past really is another country: we cannot go back. However, there is something worse that idealising the past - or presenting it to ourselves and our children as a chamber of horrors: forgetting it.

A differenza della memoria, che conferma e rafforza se stessa, la storia contribuisce al disincanto. Quasi tutto ciò che ha da offrire è sconfortante, addirittura devastante, il che spiega perché non sia sempre politicamente prudente sbandierare il passato come arma con la quale bastonare un popolo per le sue precedenti colpe. Ma la storia dev'essere imparata, e periodicamente imparata di nuovo.

History is not written as it was experienced, nor should it be. The inhabitants of the past know better than we do what it was like to live there, but they were not well placed, most of them, to understand what was happening to them and why.

But as one Hungarian who had worked for some years in California explained to an interviewer: 'America is the place to come when you are young and single. But if it is time to grow up, you should return to Europe'.

Seen from the satellite countries, the Soviet version of recent history was palpably false; but for many Russians themselves it contained more than a grain of truth.

Ztráta víry samozÃ…â"¢ejmÄ› zdaleka není tak atraktivní jako víra; i když odklon od ní m?že být racionální, ztrácíte tím víc, než získáváte.

However, there is something worse than idealizing the past—or presenting it to ourselves and our children as a chamber of horrors: forgetting it.

A tak pokaždé, když nÄ›jaký trouba prohlásí, že Saddám Husajn je druhý Hitler, musíme se do sporu vložit a tyhle zjednoduÅ¡ující pitomosti zkomplikovat. RealitÄ› odpovídající zmatek je mnohem lepÅ¡í než elegantní nepravdy.

re-surfaced.

And when I say "think," I want you to think about the subject, the location, the perspective, the lighting, the timing, the weather, the mood, the pose, the clothes, the expression, the composition, and yes, the camera settings. That's a lot to absorb

It's not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean.

Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives.

Dead can't do us no harm,' said Effie. 'Seen plenty o' haints in my time. All on the playful side. None never done me harm. All my hurts and pains come from the livin'.

I had always thought of the sea as a boundary keeping me in my place on land. Now, though, it became an opening.

We do not need such things to help us to see God," I countered. "We have His Word, and that is enough.

Truly to appreciate what fossils are requires a leap of imagination he was not capable of making.

spent much of my life in Lyme with my eyes fixed to the ground in search of fossils. Such hunting can limit a person's perspective.

I liked sleeping in the attic. There was no Crucifixion scene hanging at the foot of the bed to trouble me. There were no paintings at all, but the clean scent of linseed oil and the musk of the earth pigments. I liked my view of the New Church, and the quiet. No one came up except him. The girls did not visit me as they sometimes had in the cellar, or secretly search through my things. i felt alone there, perched high above the noisy household, able to see it from a distance.

of all the cities he had been to—Detroit, Indianapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Salt Lake City—San Francisco was by far the worst.